Cloud Castles

by Mark Axelrod, Dimitri Radoyce

In Cloud Castles, the Magical Mystery Tour begun in Cardboard Castles continues taking our Brazilian-American anti-hero, Duncan Katz, around the world...from Haifa to Nuremberg to Bellagio to Rio to Paris and back to the United States where he will begin the final chapter of his wanderings in the third novel, Capital Castles. It is the long-awaited sequel to Cardboard Castles and, like its predecessor, mixes imagistic doses of black comedy with the palliative of social consciousness. The characters are as diverse as the prose: Hadara, Duncan's partner and ex-Israeil spy; Giovanni Romanziere, the juggling deaf gardener; Monsieur Meursault, the maitre'd of Nuremberg's oldest restaurant, the Nassauerhaus; Werther and his sorrows; Dr Italo Lascivo, the randy cosmomusicologico-physician; Guia Kataimatoqve, the Amazonian shaman; and last, but clearly not least, Thanatos. As in all of his work, Axelrod pushes the proverbial envelope beyond the limits of the tongue and while leaving no stone unturned, also leaves no culture unscathed.

237 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1998

About the author

For almost two decades, Mark Axelrod has been the Director of the John Fowles Center for Creative Writing for which he has received 4 National Endowment Arts Grants. He is a two-time recipient of a United Kingdom Leverhulme Fellowship for Creative Writing (University of East Anglia, Edinburgh University), a three-time recipient of the Alliance Française National Writing Award, has written over 20 works of fiction including Capital Castles (Pacific Writers Press, 2000), Cloud Castles (Pacific Writers Press, 1998), Cardboard Castles (Pacific Writers Press, 1996) and Bombay California;or Hollywood, Somewhere West of Vine (Pacific Writers Press, 1994) and Borges’ Travel, Hemingway’s Garage (fc2, 2005) which was published in fall, ’09 in Spanish by Thule Ediciones, Barcelona as Viajes Borges, Talleres Hemingway.