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From the Book Blurb:“The Cosmic Follies is an attempt to commit, in a business-oriented medium, a grand work of experimental fiction, for the reader who might be exhausted by the tide of “comfort fiction” and commercial pabulum, and be prepared to embark on an extraordinary inner journey, set in the streets of New York City. Mo Smith, a homeless vagrant, walks northward along the crowded island of Manhattan from the southern tip of the Battery. Multiple voices, multiple personas, shifting identities and multiple tales accompany his stubborn journey. Narratives collide with each other, external characters intrude, and the age-old dramas of East and West impinge on the great towers of capital…”
The Cosmic Follies has been the most difficult of my novels to publish, as it transgressed, from a commercial point of view, on several counts at once: Complexity of narrative, politically dangerous subject-matter, and length – at 544 pages, the longest tale I have tried to tell so far. When I began writing it, in 1993, it seemed that a theme that ties in the diversity of metropolitan New York, in the year of the (first) Trade Center bombing, and the chaotic confusion of the Middle East’s past and present, was an esoteric, if not obscure concept. Today, this no longer seems the case, but there are still “popular” and “unpopular” ways of approaching this explosive subject… In any case, up to the beginning of 2004, no mainstream commercial publisher wanted to touch the book, not even with asbestos gloves.
Finally, it is being published – in June 2004 – as a collaboration between my own imprint, BlokBooks, which it inaugurates, and the ICA – the Institute of Contemporary Arts (link) in London, to whose directors I am grateful for their faith in such a risky venture.
Readers will have to decide whether THE COSMIC FOLLIES is merely The Louvish Folly or whether it is worth the price and effort.The book can be purchased directly from the author through this website – email your order to simonlouvish@aol.com with your address and I will send you the book in return for a check for £12 plus £1.50 for package and posting (total £13.50). For North America, air mail postal charges for this U.K publication are alas high (the package weight is 1 kilogram!) so $15 has to be added to the basic $22 charge making the total $37. (For Canada: $28 Canadian dollars plus 17 postage, total $46). Checks to be made out to Simon Louvish. Alternatively the book can be purchased through Amazon.co.uk, which sheds the usual middlemen’s sums along the way and will also incur foreign postage charges.
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