The Book of Lazarus - Softcover

Grossman, Richard

3.73

63 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 157366040X ISBN 13: 9781573660402

Publisher: Fiction Collective 2, 1998

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

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.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

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.

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.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.