Description: A novella and six short fictions, is by turn mythic and realistic, moving and wistful, innovative and traditional. It maps a wide geography of human emotions: lust, adventure, love, alienation, explicit violence and implicit passion.
Brief description: Ben Stoltzfus is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature and Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside. He is a novelist, translator, literary critic and internationally recognized inter-arts scholar. He has published 12 monographs of literary criticism, five novels and one collection of short stories. Romoland, a pictonovel, his most recent publication, was written in collaboration with Judith Palmer, the artist. He has received many awards: Fulbright, Camargo, Gradiva, Humanities, Creative Arts, and MLA. Stoltzfus lives in Riverside, California, with Judith Palmer, his wife.
Review Quotes:
"The Eye of the Needle, a tour de force of the French form." --Richard Rhodes, NY Times Book Review
"As a work of art, this novel is superior!" --London Telegraph
"Black Lazarus is a remarkably original and powerful book." --Rochelle Owens
"Red White & Blue is an open, adventurous, ludic text... an excellent 'read, ' all that is most enjoyable in the postmodern enterprise." --Raylene Ramsay, New Novel Review
"At once striking and revelatory... Valley of Roses bursts forth in combination of poetic style, metaphoric profusion, and elegiac tone... a fine novel." --Erik Nakjavani, International Fiction Review
"Stoltzfus blends the traditional and metafictional tendencies so successfully that each of his stories can be read as a narration of fiction. Such narrative counterpoint makes Cat O'Nine Tails an exceptionally accessible work of post-modern short fiction." --Roch C. Smith, American Book Review
"Romoland is a delightful work in which received ideas about the separate domains of masculine and feminine, inner and outer, line and mass, visual and narrative art, ruler and ruled, master and servant are playfully and seriously inverted to reveal that our unconscious sexual coding of space, time and form is coming undone." --Juliet Flower MacCannell, author of The Hysteric's Guide to the Future Female Subject