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

Picador Books – Part 6 – Hamsun, Handley, Hedayet, Heller, Herr, Hesse, Hoban & Hrabel

As you see from the title of this blog, I’ll be covering Picadors by authors whose names start with “H”.

First up, Knut Hamsun, a Norwegian author who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1920 for his epic novel Growth of the Soil.

I don’t have that book, but I do have Victoria in a Picador edition.

Max Handley is the little known author of Meanwhile and two other novels. Meanwhile is a dystopian novel wherein men and women have been separated from each other for generations and basically forgotten that the other sex exists. Men regenerate through cloning and live in an under water bubble whilst the women reproduce by pathenogenesis and occupy the land. Meanwhile follows the events of them meeting up again, after one of the men, fascinated by the species of being he discovers in girly magazines, crawls to the surface. It’s a crazy novel, very funny as well. Max Handley died in 1993 and is virtually forgotten these days.

The Blind Owl is the best known novel of Sādeq Hedāyat, an Iranian writer of poetry and novels. This is another unusual novel published by Picador. Can you imagine anyone publishing this type of book these days?

Some better known writers – Joseph Heller with Picture This, and Michael Herr’s memoir of the Vietnam War, Dispatches which was influential in the making of the films Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket.

I discovered Herman Hesse in my late teens, early twenties and deeply identified with the novel Steppenwolf which identification I regard as somewhat self indulgent these days. But heck, I was younger then. I still do have my original Penguin paperback edition of that novel,which I’ll get to later. Meanwhile, here’s one of his less famous novels, Rosshalde, in a Picador edition.

Russell Hoban was one of my favourite writers way back when, though I must admit I’ve failed to keep up with his work. I still love his book The Mouse and his Child, which he signed for me when I met him in 1984.

Here is his first novel The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz and Pilgerman, both published in Picador.

And finally I Served the King of England by Bohumil Hrabal, a Czech writer best known for writing Closely Watched Trains.

Next – more Picadors – Anna Kavan and other writers whose names begin with “K”.

Children's Books - Animal Themes

I remember as a child I was very fond of animal stories - I ploughed my way through such classic writers as R M Ballantyne and Jack London and some other writer whose name escapes me.

Anyway, I have a few such like animal stories in my collection of children's paperbacks. These included Charlotte's Web which is missing.

Everyone has heard of Watership Down by Richard Adams - a big hit back in 1972. There was even a film made of the book. But truth to tell, every time I think of Watership Down I recall this urban legend which relates to a butcher somewhere in the UK who had a sign outside his shop advertising rabbit meat. It said " You've seen the movie, you've read the book, now eat the cast."



Also rather famous in their time are the archy & mehitabel books by Don Marquis.

As the blurb says "archy is a cockroach who writes free verse on an office typewriter; mehitabel the cat claims she was once Cleopatra. As she can't type, archy, a wit, a scandal-monger and a philosopher, is forced to be her reporter."

Also involving cats is T S Eliot's Old Possums Book of Practical Cats - another very well known book which was the inspiration for the musical "Cats"

Another charming animal story is The Pig Plantagenet by Allen Andrews described on the back as a tale of wit and enchantment.

And how could one go past Russell Hoban's wonderful The Mouse & His Child. My paperback edition of this book is signed by Russell Hoban whom I met in 1984.

Next - more old children's paperbacks, I promise it will be the last of them for the time being.