Tom Bradley 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 doesn't recall being on acid at the time. He buzzed 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. Further curiosity can be indulged at tombradley.org
synopsis Visit a relocation center for spastics, mental defectives and political derelicts in the jungle outside Foo-Chow. Help prepare Japan's Crown Princess for "bridal breach" in the Togu Palace. Watch youngsters being exposed to elemental mercury in a Soviet kindergarten. Poke around for uncollapsed blood vessels with a junkie tart during High Mass in China's underground church. Learn how to make a movie from absolute scratch using only stuff you can find in the back yard.
Reviews ...a writer with a gloriously skewed and multitudinous vision...
--Darran Anderson,
3: AM Magazine Tom Bradley is the libertine that Camille Paglia tries to portray herself as, in order to keep her Jocasta fantasies at bay.
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Jonathan Penton,
When Spencer met Hannibal: Recreational Cannibalism in the New American Century It takes a twisted sense of humor to appreciate this lunatic scholar, degenerate Harold Bloom, and biblical madman.
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John-Ivan Palmer,
nthposition Magazine 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.
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Denis Dutton, editor of
Arts & Letters Daily The contemporaries of Michelangelo found it useful to employ the term
terribilita to characterize some of the expressions of his genius, and I will quote it here to sum up the shocking impact of this work as a whole. I read it in a state of fascination, admiration, awe, anxiety, and outrage.
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R.V. Cassill, editor of
The Norton Anthology of Fiction I tell you that Dr. Bradley has devoted his existence to writing because he intends for every center of consciousness, everywhere, in all planes and conditions (not just terrestrial female Homo sapiens in breeding prime), to love him forever, starting as soon as possible, though he's prepared to wait thousands of centuries after he's dead.
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Cye Johan,
Critical Appendix, Fission Among the Fanatics