Stephanie Pasvankias of PM Press writes with news of two new Michael Moorcock rereleases:
Byzantium Endures: the First Volume of the Colonel Pyat Quartet by Michael Moorcock, introduction by Alan Wall
$22.00, 400 pages, trade paperback. ISBN: 978-1-60486-491-5. On-sale date: 1 March 2012.
Meet Maxim Arturovitch Pyatnitski, also known as Pyat. Tsarist rebel, Nazi thug, continental conman, and reactionary counterspy: the dark and dangerous anti-hero of Michael Moorcock’s most controversial work.
Published in 1981 to great critical acclaim—then condemned to the shadows and unavailable in the US for thirty years—Byzantium Endures, the first of the Pyat Quartet, is not a book for the faint-hearted. It’s the story of a cocaine addict, sexual adventurer, and obsessive anti-Semite, whose epic journey from Leningrad to London connects him with scoundrels and heroes from Trotsky to Makhno, and whose career echoes that of the 20th century’s descent into Fascism and total war.
This is Moorcock at his audacious, iconoclastic best: a grand, sweeping overview of the events of the last century, as revealed in the secret journals of modern literature’s most proudly unredeemable outlaw. This authoritative US edition presents the author’s final cut, restoring previously forbidden passages and deleted scenes.
The Laughter of Carthage: The Second Volume of the Colonel Pyat Quartet by Michael Moorcock, introduction by Alan Wall
$22.00, 448 pages, trade paperback. ISBN: 978-1-60486-492-2. On-sale date: 1 July 2012.
Maxim Arturovitch Pyatnitski, that charming but despicable mythomaniac who first appeared in Byzantium Endures, is back. Having fled Bolshevik Russia in late 1919, Pyat’s progress is a series of leaps from crisis to crisis, as he begins affairs with a Baroness and a Greek prostitute while undertaking schemes to build flying machines in Europe and the United States. His devotion to flamboyantly racist, particularly anti-Semitic doctrines—like his devotion to cocaine—remains unabated, and he both sings the praises of Mussolini and lectures across America for the Ku Klux Klan. (His best kept secret is of course, the fact that he is Jewish.) As the novel ends, Pyat is in Hollywood—his new Byzantium—hobnobbing with movie stars and dreaming of making films like those of his hero, D.W. Griffith.
Engineer, braggart, addict, Pyat is a magnificent invention, a genius of innocent vituperation: his finest achievement (and that of the author) is that his own warped and deluded vision is powerful enough to redefine reality. This authoritative edition presents the first time this work has been available in paperback in the US, along with a new introduction by Alan Wall.