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Curved Jewels
Tom Bradley doesn't write novels—he detonates diplomatic scandals in prose. Curved Jewels is a literary nerve agent disguised as fiction, smuggled out of the Imperial Palace and injected straight into your bloodstream.
This isn't a story. It's a jailbreak. The Crown Princess of Japan-brilliant linguist, coerced consort, reluctant martyr-slips through the gilded cage of Hirohito's legacy with the help of two shady American expatriates. What follows is a hallucinogenic fugue of flesh trades, psychic sabotage, and bureaucratic blasphemy.
Bradley's sentences don't behave. They twitch, they bleed, they chant. He drags you through a labyrinth of imperial rot and ecstatic rebellion, where the sacred and the profane share a toothbrush and the sublime wears a cockroach crown.
Are you ready to have your mind bent, your soul audited, and your literary sa fe-word utterly ignored? This is the book they warned you about. This is the book that reads you.
--Morgen Mofó, authoress of 'SCHMUCKSTÜCK KOORVAH' in Dragonsprach
This isn't a story. It's a jailbreak. The Crown Princess of Japan-brilliant linguist, coerced consort, reluctant martyr-slips through the gilded cage of Hirohito's legacy with the help of two shady American expatriates. What follows is a hallucinogenic fugue of flesh trades, psychic sabotage, and bureaucratic blasphemy.
Bradley's sentences don't behave. They twitch, they bleed, they chant. He drags you through a labyrinth of imperial rot and ecstatic rebellion, where the sacred and the profane share a toothbrush and the sublime wears a cockroach crown.
Are you ready to have your mind bent, your soul audited, and your literary sa fe-word utterly ignored? This is the book they warned you about. This is the book that reads you.
--Morgen Mofó, authoress of 'SCHMUCKSTÜCK KOORVAH' in Dragonsprach
Paperback
First published January 1, 2001
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About the author
Tom Bradley
49 books14 followerstombradley.org
Tom received his novelist's calling at the age of nineteen. He climbed into the moonlit mountains around his hometown, where he got an unambiguous vocation with physical symptoms and everything, just like Martin Luther in the electric storm. He fucked permanently off from America in 1985, moved to Red China, and has lurked around the left rim of the Pacific ever since, in a successful search for sinecures that steal virtually no time and absolutely no mental energy from his writing.
Energeticum / Phantasticum: a Profane Epyllion was released in 2017 by MadHat Press. The same company published a blank verse epic, fully illustrated, called Useful Despair as Taught to the Hemorrhaging Slave of an Obese Eunuch. Guernica Editions brought out another blank verse epic, Injuring Eternity: a Künstlerroman in Twenty-Six Cantos. Still another blank verse epic, called Nagasaki Soul Huffer: a Manhunt in Fifty-Five Cantos, was released by the great Swedish publisher-film studio, Trapart.
Tom has published thirty-six volumes of poetry, fiction, essays and screenplays with houses in England, Canada and the USA. Various of his novels have been nominated for the Editor’s Book Award, the New York University Bobst Prize, and the AWP Series. 3:AM Magazine in Paris gave him their Nonfiction Book of the Year Award in 2007 and 2009, and one of his latest graphic novels is excerpted in the &Now Award Anthology.
Tom's prose shares the legendary pages of London's AMBIT Magazine with J.G. Ballard and Ralph Steadman. His journalism and criticism have appeared in such publications as Salon.com, and are frequently featured in Arts & Letters Daily. Denis Dutton, editor of the site (“among the most influential media personalities in the world,” according to Time Magazine), wrote as follows:
“Tom Bradley is one of the most exasperating, offensive, pleasurable, and brilliant writers I know. I recommend his work to anyone with spiritual fortitude and a taste for something so strange that it might well be genius.”
HTMLGIANT says:
“Tom Bradley has long been known for repeatedly performing, at will, almost offhandedly, a task one would have thought impossible, perhaps magical, in these latter jaded days: the invention of new genres. Andrei Codrescu hailed his quasi-nonfiction opus Fission Among the Fanatics as ‘the first appearance of a genre so strange we are turning away from naming it...’ In the field of meta-scholarship, the late Carol Novack described his Epigonesia as ‘that rarity of rarities: a new genre, something like a superficially nonfictional Pale Fire, taking place in real time as the primary text alternately rides roughshod over, and is sapped and subverted by, the critical apparatus.’ More recently, in his books Family Romance and We’ll See Who Seduces Whom, Bradley has yanked new kinks into the synaesthetic art of ekphrasis. He ‘accepted the challenge posed by stacks of preexisting art’ and wrote a novel and an epic poem, respectively, around them...’”
Reviews and excerpts, a couple hours of recorded readings, plus links to Tom's essays in Salon.com and other such high-tone swanky magazines, are at tombradley.org
Tom received his novelist's calling at the age of nineteen. He climbed into the moonlit mountains around his hometown, where he got an unambiguous vocation with physical symptoms and everything, just like Martin Luther in the electric storm. He fucked permanently off from America in 1985, moved to Red China, and has lurked around the left rim of the Pacific ever since, in a successful search for sinecures that steal virtually no time and absolutely no mental energy from his writing.
Energeticum / Phantasticum: a Profane Epyllion was released in 2017 by MadHat Press. The same company published a blank verse epic, fully illustrated, called Useful Despair as Taught to the Hemorrhaging Slave of an Obese Eunuch. Guernica Editions brought out another blank verse epic, Injuring Eternity: a Künstlerroman in Twenty-Six Cantos. Still another blank verse epic, called Nagasaki Soul Huffer: a Manhunt in Fifty-Five Cantos, was released by the great Swedish publisher-film studio, Trapart.
Tom has published thirty-six volumes of poetry, fiction, essays and screenplays with houses in England, Canada and the USA. Various of his novels have been nominated for the Editor’s Book Award, the New York University Bobst Prize, and the AWP Series. 3:AM Magazine in Paris gave him their Nonfiction Book of the Year Award in 2007 and 2009, and one of his latest graphic novels is excerpted in the &Now Award Anthology.
Tom's prose shares the legendary pages of London's AMBIT Magazine with J.G. Ballard and Ralph Steadman. His journalism and criticism have appeared in such publications as Salon.com, and are frequently featured in Arts & Letters Daily. Denis Dutton, editor of the site (“among the most influential media personalities in the world,” according to Time Magazine), wrote as follows:
“Tom Bradley is one of the most exasperating, offensive, pleasurable, and brilliant writers I know. I recommend his work to anyone with spiritual fortitude and a taste for something so strange that it might well be genius.”
HTMLGIANT says:
“Tom Bradley has long been known for repeatedly performing, at will, almost offhandedly, a task one would have thought impossible, perhaps magical, in these latter jaded days: the invention of new genres. Andrei Codrescu hailed his quasi-nonfiction opus Fission Among the Fanatics as ‘the first appearance of a genre so strange we are turning away from naming it...’ In the field of meta-scholarship, the late Carol Novack described his Epigonesia as ‘that rarity of rarities: a new genre, something like a superficially nonfictional Pale Fire, taking place in real time as the primary text alternately rides roughshod over, and is sapped and subverted by, the critical apparatus.’ More recently, in his books Family Romance and We’ll See Who Seduces Whom, Bradley has yanked new kinks into the synaesthetic art of ekphrasis. He ‘accepted the challenge posed by stacks of preexisting art’ and wrote a novel and an epic poem, respectively, around them...’”
Reviews and excerpts, a couple hours of recorded readings, plus links to Tom's essays in Salon.com and other such high-tone swanky magazines, are at tombradley.org
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Review of advance copy received from Author
I would like to thank the author for the opportunity to read this ARC. The story is good and has an interesting premise that caught my attention from the start.
However, even though I enjoyed the plot, there were some moments where the story felt a bit flat for me. Some parts lacked the pace I usually look for, but overall it is a solid effort. I truly appreciate being able to read this work and I wish the author much success with this book!
However, even though I enjoyed the plot, there were some moments where the story felt a bit flat for me. Some parts lacked the pace I usually look for, but overall it is a solid effort. I truly appreciate being able to read this work and I wish the author much success with this book!
Displaying 1 of 1 review