Bøger af Richard Londraville

In THE INVENTION OF EYES, poet Richard Londraville has explored the dramatic narrative, as shown in sections titled "After the Curtain" and "Mythologies," where characters from fiction and myth speak directly to the reader. He has also written of more personal experiences in "Literati" (including poems about authors he has known: writers John Updike, Stephen Spender, and Jeanne Robert Foster), "Occasionals," "Fauna and Flora," and "Sounds." Finally he has attempted a clear and unsentimental examination of dissolution in the ultimate section of this work, "At Last."

WHAT I DID FOR LOVE: A WRITER'S REVENGE is the story of Milt Ian, but is actually a novel of novels. Milt is 43 and faces life by burying himself in his latest project. He has earned a meager living by writing Westerns, but his career has alienated him from three ex-wives and damaged his relationship with his son, the only human for whom he cares deeply. Milt has always believed in the Western as a kind of spiritual force for good, and his hero, the six-gun toting Bronco Slater, functions as Milt's alter ego. But faced with the shrinking market for this genre, his practical and persistent agent, Lilah Bergson, insists he assume the pen name of Diana Devlin and write Romance novels. Under duress, he tries, and the result is THE HAWK AND THE DOVE, the story of Rebecca Ravenscroft, her evil uncle, and the rugged lord of Hawksley Hall, Bronson Slade. Milt never forgets his old friend, Bronco, though, and returns to him whenever too many misty moors and heaving bosoms disturb his sense of creative veracity. Success and money come to him at last when Bronson and Rebecca achieve a fan base that surpasses anything Bronco Slater ever garnered. But it is not Milt Ian that readers embrace; it is Diana Devlin. After a career of relative anonymity, Milt must accept that his only real fame will come from a persona he can't acknowledge. As Milt juggles these novels through the pages of his own story, he begins to understand that the characters are changing his life, at first imperceptibly, but then by giving him a more active voice in his own destiny.

THE THREE TEMPTATIONS OF GUY SPENSER is a novel about the development of a young man dealing with the complicated journey that is his life. He is the product of a comfortable, middle-class upbringing that leaves him ill prepared in a world he assumes to be his birthright as a bright, reasonably attractive American male. He eases from minimal success as a student to the subsistence existence of an adjunct professor without any plan for a future beyond his next precarious semester contract. He might have been content in that limbo forever, but a series of incidents push him into a real world replete with opportunities and pitfalls. A misunderstood and mostly innocent encounter with a coed is the catalyst for Guy Spenser being forced-bewildered and unprepared-to find another job. In a series of improbable steps, he moves from adjunct professor, to talk show host, to assistant for an aging porn star, to-finally-the discovery of his talent as an advertising executive. The novel is divided into four parts: Sloth, Vanity, Lust, and Signs, with the first three sections detailing Guy's temptations. Readers may recognize echoes of Edmund Spenser's FAERIE QUEENE as a model. The main character, Guy Spenser, is a twenty-first century pilgrim encountering updated perils faced by Guyon, the Knight of Temperance, in his quest for a perfect life. Henrik Ibsen, the Norwegian dramatist, argues that a well-constituted truth may last for as long as twenty years. After that it begins to sicken and die. What happens when the Chivalric code is applied to modern sensibility? Will any or all of the original values survive the time warp?

This collection of short stories represents several decades of the author's experiments with form, ideas, and points of view. From a boy writhing in the confines of a Catholic education to a young woman discovering the limitations of her soul mate through the process of "driver instruction," these narratives run the gamut from humorous, to arcane, to frightening. Some stories in these pages are dredged from early memories, however imperfectly recalled and manipulated. Others are more speculative, projected from the authorial "What if?" Additionally, this book includes sample chapters from three of the author's forthcoming novels-each with a markedly different hero: a small town detective, an acerbic hack writer forced to write Romance novels, and a young man who finds it difficult to break away from the cocoon of academia.

DESIGNER DEATH is the story of small town detective Stan Gorski as he hunts for the source of the drugs that have recently killed two of Bowland, New York's promising teenagers. His quest is personal. Several years earlier his younger sister died from an overdose, and he suspects that the same criminals are to blame--but this time the drugs are deliberately designed to kill. Stan and his police department captain must resolve personal conflicts and follow the clues that lead to suspects as different as two Jordanian princes and a thug named Spiro. In the meantime, brutal murders continue. DESIGNER DEATH keeps the reader on edge until the last page.

Jeanne Foster challenged the accepted role for women at the turn of the twentieth century. Born on a hardscrabble farm in the Adirondack Mountains in 1879, she was hailed as an important voice in American poetry by 1916 when her first books of verse, Neighbors of Yesterday and Wild Apples were published. She had early success as a model--she was the Harrison Fisher girl of 1903--and later became a journalist for the American Review of Reviews. In 1918, she met John Quinn, patron of the arts, which placed her in the middle of some of the most important literary and artistic movements in the twentieth century. She counted among her friends John Butler and William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, Pablo Picasso, and Constantin Brancusi. This book reveals her dark affair with Aleister Crowley and her great friendship with Tomas Masaryk of Czechoslovakia. Today, Jeanne Foster lies buried in Chestertown, New York, next to her old friend John Butler Yeats.