Picador Books – Part 7 – Anna Kavan, Ken Kesey, Maxine Hong Kingston, J K Klavans & Richard Klein

Anna Kavan’s novels were rediscovered in the 1970s and Picador published at least two of them, Ice and Sleep Has His House.

Reading her biography on Wikipedia and the website dedicated to her, she sounds like she was a very strange lady.

The Picador editions below have wonderful cover art by Paul Delvaux. I also have copy of her novel Julia and the Bazooka in a 1974 Panther paperback edition.

Ken Kesey was well known as one of the Merry Pranksters, the antics of whom are described in Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

Anyway Kesey very much appealed to the counter culture of the 1960s and 70s. Below is the Picador edition of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.

The Woman Warrior and China Men are memoirs by Maxine Hong Kingston of growing up in a Chinese American family. It is many years since I’ve read these books, but I recall being enthralled by them at the time. Note to self – read them again soon.

I don’t know much about J K Klavans but I do have her novel God He Was Good in a Picador edition. I remember looking for this book everywhere and finally stumbling across it in a second hand bookshop. Quite frankly, I don’t think it was worth the effort. Anyway, the cover is interesting.

And lastly, for this entry anyway, Cigarettes Are Sublime by Richard Klein, a defence, and cultural history of cigarette smoking. The Picador edition has a very classy cover.

More Picadors to follow…

General Fiction – Kesey, Kilworth & Kotzwinkle

To begin, two single novels (though they wrote others) by Ken Kesey and Garry Kilworth.

Sometimes A Great Notion derives its name from the famous Huddie Ledbetter (Leadbelly) song “Goodnight Irene”, a song that has peculiar significance to me from my childhood, which I won’t go into here. It is Kesey’s second novel, not as famous as One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, but well worth including in anyone’s book collection.

Garry Kilworth’s Witchwater Country is a rather good coming of age novel – slightly spooky. I must admit it is the only one of his novels that I have read.

Now on to William Kotzwinkle, known mostly as a writer of comic novels. His somewhat bizzare novels were very popular back in the 1970s, most particularly The Fan Man – the archetypical 60s novel. The edition pictured is 1977 Penguin.

Doctor Rat won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 1977. It’s a savage satirical novel about vivisection. The paperback edition has a fantastic, though gruesome cover.

More William Kotzwinkle – with interesting cover art.

Next – Lampedusa and other authors whose names start with “L” & “M”