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ERIC LARSEN, FOUNDER & PUBLISHER
"The Nation's Last Truly Independent Press" | |
PREPARE YOURSELF FOR THE HILARIOUS, PHILOSOPHIC, MOVING NOVEL,
ABLONG |
ABLONG? What on earth strange kind of word is that? Is it a thing? Is it even in the dictionary? Is it a word taken from some deep, ancient, ridiulously arcane field of philosophy, or maybe mathematics?
Close, but no cigar.
The truth is that you're looking at "it" right now: "Ablong" is the man you see here at the right, Professor Wilson Ablong, the winner of the Nobel Prize and the mathematical genius whose thinking has resulted in the means for curing and eliminating more major diseases than you can count on--well, on one hand plus a couple of extra digits.
Here's what the back cover of the novel says:
Broccoli for breakfast is not recommended unless it's putting you in touch with central truths about human nature. And in this comic-serious masterpiece, that's exactly what it does for Professor Wilson Ablong, rudely irreverent Nobel laureate and medical hero. Yet Ablong remains a lost and isolated soul--until a young man seeking a mentor turns the professor's world upside-down. Then the same mind that drew from mythology, math, literature, and philosophy to cure major diseases begins scouring its own contents to heal itself.
So sit down, take a few deep breaths, and join Wilson Ablong on his
sly, subtle, sharp, and riotously funny quest and let this unusual work wash over you with its charm, resonance, and--yes, its profound depth. ABOUT ALAN SALANT ALAN SALANT studied mathematics and literature at Princeton University. He is a writer--and a thinker--who wishes for a society that places a higher value on introspection and contemplation. Readers of Ablong may detect subtle but meaningful parallels between Alan Salant and the marvelously intriguing character he has invented. But, no, the two are not the same person. We don't exactly know where Ablong lives. But Salant lives in New York City with his long-time domestic partner, Sheila Fallik, who is a social worker and geriatric care manager. |
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NEWS ABOUT
I HOPE MY CORPSE GIVES YOU THE PLAGUE: MY LIFE IN THE BUSH ERA OF GHOSTS | |
The title tells everything--well, except that it doesn't. It's angry, yes, but in the pages behind that cover, you'll find lots more than only anger. Youl'll find compassion, sorrow, insight by the bushel basket, tolerance by the truckload, and, something requiring even bigger containers than trucks to hold it all, huge enormities of every kind and sort of humor.
Adam Engel is the most gifted of the writers, essayists, and commentators who became known through chronicling the despair, anger, and fear that came with living through the George W. Bush administration, maybe more especially the earlier years of it.
Back then, mainly but only only between 2002 and 2005, Engel appeared on influential and important web sites like Online Journal, Lew Rockwell, Counterpunch, Dissident Voice, Countercurrents, Press Action, and Strike-the-Root. On his Acknowledgements page in Corpse, he says something about these online magazines that deserves repeating, partly because of what it says about the author's understanding of their importance, but also because of what it says about his own understanding of the importance of writing itself:
Day after day, week after week, year after year, these sites and others like them offer venues for writers, scholars, jourmalists and activists to speak truth to Power. It's true that Power couldn't give a damn. But many people crushed by that same power find ideas on these web sites worth living and dying for.
That's what Oliver thinks, too--that real writing, as opposed to all the fake and deceitful stuff, is worth living and dying for.
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NOW SEE, HEAR, AND READ THIS:
 | | WRITERS AFTER GOOD REVIEWS |
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WHAT'S COMING UP | |
Brace yourselves for Cella Fantastik, a book like no other book ever written or conceived--again, by Adam Engel.
And keep an eye cocked for Eric Larsen's The Skull of Yorick: The Emptiness of American Thinking in a Time of Great Peril.
And after these? More to come. Keep alert. Spread the word. Tell everyone you know about The Oliver Arts & Open Press. And tell them to tell everyone they know.
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Be on the lookout for Helen Tzagoloff's wonderful book of poetry, 