Synopses & Reviews
Fiction. The story of a brutal war between the Mafia and a seventies revolutionary gang, THE BOOK OF LAZARUS is the second volume of Richard Grossman's AMERICAN LETTERS TRILOGY, which describes earthly visions of hell, purgatory, and heaven. If an artist's task is indeed, as Beckett claimed, to 'find a form to accommodate the mess,' then Grossman has certainly done it, with an exceptional feat of choreography and a radical vision for the possibilities of fiction -- Village Voice. Mr. Grossman is also the author of THE ALPHABET MAN, the first novel in his AMERICAN LETTERS TRILOGY, as well as THE ANIMALS, a five hundred poem pastoral; both are available from SPD.
Synopsis
A masterpiece of modern letters as shocking as it is spiritual.
Synopsis
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, for years. As she uncovers the story of his life, death, and the vast fortune he has left behind, a frightening family history unfolds. Here is the core of Richard Grossman's challenging new novel. Surrounding that core, however, is another world - one in which Grossman creates visual and formal challenges for his readers as he unearths the stories of the dead and the insane. Filled with poetry and aphorisms as well as photographs and hand-written notes from the grave, The Book of Lazarus creates a new American novel.