More writer's quotes-more advance blurbs for The Rapist

Hi folks,

Here come some more advance blurbs for THE RAPIST. And, following these, some more writer’s quotes for your perusal… Building the buzz... (click on the links to see their own way-good books)

From the fantastic British writer, Tony Black

The Rapist's narrator has the same overweening self-importance as Nabokov's Humbert Humbert and the Lolita comparisons don't end there. At times you don't want to look, you want to wash your mind out but this compelling work, told in bleakly sonorous prose, pulls you back. Les Edgerton has produced that rare thing: a book of seriousness.
Tony Black, author of Murder Mile

And one from another fantastic writer, Heath Lowrance

With THE RAPIST, Les Edgerton has written the most bone-chilling, evocative, depraved and insightful novel of the year. Forget "hardboiled", forget "noir", forget everything you think you know about what a genre story is supposed to be. THE RAPIST brushes all of that aside with a disdainful sneer and instead presents something that aspires to far more than any single genre can provide. More than anything else, this novel occupies that same uneasy space that Dostoevsky's "Notes from Underground" rests in-- a controlled testament of misanthropy and delusion. But whereas the great Russian's protagonist was fueled by rage, Edgerton's narrator is fueled by a sharp, ugly narcissism, and a beastly inhuman nature that peeks like a stalker through his eloquent language and high-minded ideas. Not so much a plot-driven novel as a narrative, Edgerton guides us into the mind of his narrator and leaves us there alone to fend for ourselves and make our own way back from the darkness. How much of what Truman says can we dismiss as the ravings of a damaged mind? And how much must we stop and listen to, hunting for a glimmer of truth?

THE RAPIST is a challenging novel, not for the squeamish, and definitely not for anyone who dislikes being pulled out of their comfort zone. It quite simply blew me away. Destined to be a classic.

Heath Lowrance, The Bastard Hand, Dig Ten Graves, City of Heretics and others.

Thanks, guys!

And, here’s some other writer’s talking about writing and other stuff. From Writers On Writing, edited by Jon Winokur.

On bestsellers:

“A bestseller is the gilded tomb of a mediocre talent.” Logan Pearsall Smith

“Bestsellerism is the star system of the book world. A ‘bestseller’ is a celebrity among books. It is known primarily (sometimes exclusively) for its well-knownness.” David J. Boorstin

“Can anybody be so naïve as to think he or she can learn anything about the past from those buxom bestsellers that are hawked around by book clubs under the heading of historical novels?” Vladimir Nabokov

“The writing of a bestseller represents only a fraction of the total effort required to create one.” Ted Nicholas

“If we should ever inaugurate a hall of fame, it would be reserved exclusively and hopefully for authors who, having written four bestsellers, still refrained from starting out on a lecture tour.” E.B. White

“A bestseller was a book which somehow sold well simply because it was selling well.” Daniel J.

Boorstin

“The principle of procrastinated rape is said to be the ruling one in all the great bestsellers.” V.S. Pritchett

More on writers writing about other writers

“Gertrude Stein’s prose is a cold, black suet-pudding. WE can represent it as a cold suet-roll of fabulously reptilian length. Cut it at any point, it is… the same heavy, sticky, opaque mass all through and all along.” Percy Wyndham Lewis

“Miss Stein was a past master a making nothing happen very slowly.” Clifton Fadiman

“I read him for the first time in the early forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.” Vladimir Nabokov on Ernest Hemingway

“Hemingway was a necromancer who adopted every superior Balzacian trick in the book, each technical device that Flaubert and Tolstoy and Dickens had found useful, so that quite often his work seemed better than it really was.” James Michener

“Hemingway had a remarkable interest in and understanding of homosexuality, for a man who wasn’t a homosexual.” Tennessee Williams

“Thomas Wolfe has always seemed to me the most overrated, long-winded and boring of reputable American novelists.” Edith Oliver

“He writes by sanded fingertips.” Lillian Hellman on Tennessee Williams

“The only man who wrote a great deal in our time was John O’Hara, because he went on the wagon and had nothing else to do.” Irwin Shaw

“Hard to lay down but easy not to pick up.” Malcolm Cowley on John O’Hara’s novels

“He’d be all right if he took his finger out of his mouth.” Harold Robbins on Truman Capote

“She looks like a truck driver in drag.” Truman Capote on Jacqueline Susann

“I’m glad there are people like Burroughs to take the dope and all so I don’t have to do it.” John Barth

“Each writer is a separate entity. The mistake people like Mailer make is that writing is for him a track race.” William Styron

“He’s a second-rate Stephen Birmingham. And Steven Birmingham is third-rate.” Truman Capote on Louis Auchincloss

“I knew Faulkner very well. He was a great friend of mine. Well, as much as you could be a friend of his, unless you were a fourteen-year-old nymphet.” Truman Capote

“H.L. Mencken suffers from the hallucination that he is H.L. Mencken—there is no cure for a disease of that magnitude.” Maxwell Bodenheim

“You should approach Joyce’s Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.” William Faulkner

“James Joyce—an essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized.” Tom Stoppard

Hope you enjoyed ‘em! More soon…

Blue skies,

Les

Me and some buds tailgating in the Notre Dame parking lot before heading into the game a couple of years ago. Go Irish!