General Fiction – Che Guevara, Rodney Hall, Anne Hebert, Hermann Hesse, Alan V Hewat, Russell Hoban, Spencer Holst, Glyn Hughes, J K Huysmans,

A bit out of place in the fiction shelves Che Guevara’s Bolivian Diary was first published by Lorrimer Third World Press in 1968, and is indeed the edition pictured below. Che Guevara was and still remains an iconic figure in popular culture, the archetypal revolutionary hero. I did have a poster of him at the time as well, long lost.

 Rodney Hall is a well known Australian author. His novel (the only one of his books I appear to own) Just Relations won the Miles Franklin Award in 1982.

I can’t say I know much about Anne Hebert or her novel In The Shadow of the Wind, but it won the Prix Femina in 1982.

I have a good collection of Hermann Hesse novels, mostly in Penguin and Picador editions. These two paperback editions with quite distinctive covers were published by Jonathan Cape in 1972/73. The cover art is credited to Alan Tunbridge

Lady’s Time by Alan V Hewat won the 1985 Hemingway Foundation PEN Award. It’s  an unusual magic realist, crime cum ghost story set in New Orleans. I was very impressed with this book when I first read it in the 1980s.

Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban surely needs no introduction. A wonderful dystopian tale set in a post nuclear world, written in a dialect that at first is hard to grasp, but once understood, leads to a confronting first hand account of life in the post holocaust world. The edition below is a fairly recent one, as I don’t think I acquired it when it was first published back in 1980. I won this one from Clare Dudman on her Keeper of the Snails blog, when she was giving away a copy for BAFAB week back in 2006.

Spencer Holst was an American writer of whimsical somewhat twisted short stories.

“The typical Holst story might be a gentle but twisted fable, such as the tale of a frog who, having become addicted to morphine during a laboratory experiment, was rejected by the woman whose kiss transformed him back into a prince because he was, after all, only a junkie.” from Wikipedia

I have two of his books, a UK first edition hard cover copy of The Language of Cats, published in 1971 by Jonathan Cape, and a large paperback copy of his collected stories The Zebra Storyteller (click link to read title story online). 

The following two books by West Yorkshire writer Glyn Hughes, I would classify as rural fiction like that of Thomas Hardy and Mary Webb, both novels being very much informed by the landscape of the region in which they are set.

And lastly for this post the decadent La Bas by J K Huysmans. This edition published by  Dover in 1972.

Coming up - “J”, “K” and “L” authors