Sunday, April 4, 2010

Paperback 304: Seven / Carson McCullers (Bantam Giant A1235)

Paperback 304: Bantam Giant A1235 (1st ptg — unusually, labeled "First Edition" — 1954)

Title: Seven
Author: Carson McCullers
Cover artist: Mitchell Hooks

Yours for: $9

  • ... in which an Amazon thrashes a little hunchback with a whip, a young Army private steals a heap of seatbelts from Abe Lincoln and Harry Truman, and Old Joe McGuffin asks Joey if he's ever been in a Turkish prison.
  • Never was a big fan of the multi-scene cover — too much going on, all the art gets short shrift.

  • "A fourth-dimensional quality" — so ... it's a book about time travel, then? Awesome.
  • "... the tempestuous seas of human living" — yeesh, dial it back, Cap'n Foley.
  • "Troubling of a Star" is a terrrrrrible title. Why not just call it "The Troubling Star" or "Star Trouble" or "Raiders of the Lost Ark" or something?
  • New York TIMES (!) gives us perhaps the best one-word review of a book so far: "... ABLE"; that's not a review, that's a suffix.

Page 123~

The child repeated the words, and she repeated them with unbelieving terror. "The tooth tree!"


~RP

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter]

3 comments:

Michael5000 said...

Carson McCullers, "she"?

Aw, shit, apparently I'm an idiot....

DuhKaiser said...

"Troubling of a Star" is from a poem by drug-addled Victorian poet, Francis Thomson.

Doesn't make it any better as a title.

Frank said...

You mean she writes about whites AND Negroes in the fourth-dimension! Unbelievable! We all know whites are confined to three.