This new novel from the contemporary American writer and poet will be published in hardcover in June 1997 by Fiction Collective Two and distributed by Northwestern University Press. Like the characters who inhabit it--acid casualties, Mafia wives, political terrorists, and the like--Richard Grossman's latest work, the second book in his American Letters Trilogy, locates itself outside of the mainstream, and has already begun to win praise from other contemporary writers and critics like Dennis Cooper, Steven Moore, and Benjamin Weissman.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Library Journal
When Emma Goldman O'Bannion is summoned from Rome for the reading of her father's will, her pursuit of the truth embroils her in Mafia intrigue, radical politics, hard drugs, murder, and madness. Why did Emma's father abandon her? Where did the millions of dollars come from? And who is Emma's supposed "brother," a troubled old man named Bobby Lazarus who dresses as a crossing guard? This second novel in a projected trilogy is less grisly than its predecessor (Pen West Fiction Prize nominee The Alphabet Man, LJ 10/15/93) but equally intense and experimental. Emma's narrative occupies only 126 pages but is accompanied by Bobby Lazarus's notebook: aphorisms of the People's Liberation Brigade, a 70-page sentence fragment by a brigade member, a collection of two-line poems and drawings by another, letters, a "Hallowed Hall of Heroes" who died saving the lives of others, and, finally, a revelatory poem, "The Crossing Guard," by Lazarus himself. A powerful, fascinating novel; highly recommended.?Jim Dwyer, California State Univ. Lib., Chico
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From the Publisher
The Book of Lazarus is as much a novel about the O'Banion family as it is a scrapbook of the dead--murder victims, to be exact. The death of Mitchell O'Banion, a.k.a. Mitchell Finkelstein, a former political terrorist with family ties to organized crime, brings together a bizarre lot of ex-anarchists whose paths have criss-crossed from the heady days of the sixties to the present. In the middle of it all is Emma O'Banion, who has not seen her father Mitchell in four years. As Emma uncovers the story of her father's life and death, she discovers the vast fortune he has left behind, and a frightening family history is unfolded.
Surrounding this fictional core is another world, one in which Grossman creates visual and formal challenges for his readers while he unearths the stories of the dead and insane. Filled with poetry and aphorisms as well as photographs and handwritten notes from the grave, The Book of Lazarus creates a new American novel, filled with all the darkness and suffering of our time while simultaneously recapturing an avant-garde formalism now missing from contemporary fiction.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Changing forms,
This review is from: The Book of Lazarus (Hardcover)
Mr. Grossman's last novel should change our reading habits: despite its - at firts glance - strange and complex structure, it is a story about how we deny the right to the past to be more than a parallax effect. It engraves our so-called linearity in an ever-changing form, in order to open our eyes: the world is made of voices, and each voice creates its own world. To enter these worlds, one has to be stripped naked of all conventions. This is a great novel, for all those who read Vollmann, Danielewski, D. Cooper.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
T.B.O.L. is three quarters intrigue and one quarter ramble.,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Book of Lazarus (Hardcover)
Grossman's The Book of Lazarus follows a subverted pattern of character surround, in which Grossman forces the reader into a superb spectral analysis of how each character will eventually fall prey to the sinister underworld connections of Mitchell O'Banion. O'Banion's daughter, a compelling character who leads the reader through a maze of political and intelligence countermands, becomes one of the last connected characters to perish. But her legacy and the path to get there create a unique and fresh contemporary novel, whose photographic reminisces to the dead (the actual book of Lazarus)fit well into the novel's scenic and dark forms. If not for a somewhat unrelated and stupendously unending political ramble at the end, this novel would own an integrity one rarely finds in contemporary novels.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Amazing Piece Of Art,
This review is from: The Book of Lazarus (Paperback)
I bought this book when it was first published and never got around to reading it. After I read it, I was amazed and shocked by the intelligence it took to put this piece of art together. Thinking about it now, I am still in shock that someone could put something together so smart and so ingenious. Buy this book and stick with it!
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