The Beetle Leg

The Cannibal

"No synopsis conveys the quality of this now famous novel about an hallucinated Germany in collapse after World War II. John Hawkes, in his search for a means to transcend outworn modes of fictional realism, has discovered a a highly original technique for objectifying the perennial degradation of mankind within a context of fantasy….

Nowhere has the nightmare of human terror and the deracinated sensibility been more consciously analyzed than in . Yet one is aware throughout that such analysis proceeds only in terms of a resolutely committed humanism." — Hayden Carruth

An English horse race, the Golden Bowl at Aldington, provides the background for John Hawkes' exciting novel, The Lime Twig, which tells of an ingenious plot to steal and race a horse under a false name. But it would be unfair to the reader to reveal what happens when a gang of professional crooks gets wind of the scheme and moves to muscle in on this bettors' dream of a long-odds situation.

Worked out with all the meticulous detail, terror, and suspense of a nightmare, the tale is, on one level, comparable to a Graham Greene thriller; on another, it explores a group of people, their relationships, fears, and loves. For as Leslie A.Fiedler says in his introduction, "John Hawkes. . makes terror rather than love the center of his work, knowing all the while, of course, that there can be no terror without the hope for love and love's defeat. . " "The 'Lime Twig' is one of the most perfect novels of the 60's, a masterwork of the bizarre, made like a poem so that every word resonates mystery and meaning forward and backward as the story moves".

Skipper, an ex-World War II naval Lieutenant and the narrator of Second Skin, interweaves past and present — what he refers to as his "naked history" — in a series of episodes that tell the story of a volatile life marked by pitiful losses, as well as a more elusive, overwhelming, joy. The past: the suicides of his father, wife and daughter, the murder of his son-in-law, a brutal rape, and subsequent mutiny at sea. The present: caring for his granddaughter on a "northern" island where he works as an artificial inseminator of cows, and attempts to reclaim the innocence with which he faced the tragedies of his earlier life.

Combining unflinching descriptions of suffering with his sense of beauty, Hawkes is a master of nimble and sensuous prose who makes the awful and mundane fantastic, and occasionally makes the fantastic surreal.

"Rich, evocative, highly original piece of fiction. It gilds contemporary American literature with real, not synthetic, gold." — Anthony Burgess

"Need I insist that the only enemy of the mature marriage is monogamy? That anything less than sexual multiplicity. . is naive? That our sexual selves are merely idylers in a vast wood?" Thus the central theme of John Hawkes's widely acclaimed novel is boldly asserted by its narrator, Cyril, the archetypal multisexualist. Likening himself to a white bull on Love's tapestry, he pursues his romantic vision in a primitive Mediterranean landscape. There two couples — Cyril and Fiona, Hugh and Catherine — mingle their loves in an "lllyria" that brings to mind the equally timeless countryside of Shakespeare's .

Yet no synopsis or comparison can convey the novel's lyric comedy or, indeed, its sinister power — sinister because of the strength of will Cyril exerts over his wife, his mistress, his wife's reluctant lover; lyric, since he is also a “sex-singer" in the land where music is the food of love.

Death, Sleep & The Traveler is about a middle-aged Dutchman, his dissolving marriage, his involvement in two sexual triangles, his obsession with the murder he is accused of having committed on a pleasure cruise.

The author of seven full-length novels, several plays, and numerous short fictions, John Hawkes over the course of two and a half decades has won international acclaim. Death, Sleep & The Traveler is about a middle-aged Dutchman, his dissolving marriage, his involvement in two sexual triangles, his obsession with the murder he is accused of having committed on a pleasure cruise. “It is an exceptionally concise and beautiful work,” writes the novelist-critic Jonathan Baumbach, “delicate, erotic, dreamlike — in all, a luminous novel by the richest prose stylist in American letters since Faulkner.”

Do you betray your country or your consciousness? Stuck between capital punishment for desertion or condoning killing while possibly going insane from experimental field drugs, Peter Verum, a lifelong pacifist and patriot, must answer this question and end the battle in his mind when he receives draft summons to fight in the Sapian-Herculean war. A prior Junior at college, Peter lives in a society run by a unitary global Party, where all citizens vote by using a phone app and tolerance is enforced to such an extreme that differing opinions can reversely land you in jail. But this is also a society that has been blessed with global peace, Peter’s generation marking a century free of war—until alien Herculeans invade a neighboring colonial planet, Nova Terra. Peter is quickly drafted like thousands of others to meet the threat, and now a year later, he has just returned back to Earth from his tour, but not in the usual way: secretly in fear for his life. Peter has survived something he wasn’t supposed to while deployed, and the information he has that the Party wants to remain a secret can cost him his life. As the sole survivor that knows the truth behind a botched government cover up on Nova Terra, Peter wonders if anyone will ever believe him. The reason, he has skeletons in his own closet from deployment. But even more damning is his younger self following him around telling him to go back and fight till he dies, or that his only friend is a jealous cloud that encourages him to succumb back to a drug addiction that makes him homicidal. The Party doesn’t need much to prove Peter is clinically insane, but that crucial determination lies on one thing. How did Peter survive when everyone thought he was dead? And what really did happen on Nova Terra? Now as the only witness left Peter retells his story, where maybe along the way he will also figure out what patriotism really is, and what it truly means to be a citizen. Rejected by agents and publishers alike for being too controversial, Travesty is brought to you by the author himself via Kindle.

Незауряден тот, кто приютил лягушку! Да-да, у главного героя изысканной и филигранной сказки выдающегося американского постмодерниста XX века Джона Хоукса в животе поселилась лягушка по имени Арман — не метафора, не аллегория и не символ. Совершенно реальное и живое земноводное, обладающее к тому же ненасытным любопытством, прескверным характером и незаурядным сексуальным аппетитом.

Маленький шедевр современной литературы — роман Джона Хоукса «Лягух» — впервые на русском языке.