MacDonald Harris

It is 1980's Los Angeles. Alys, a wealthy young dilettante accepts the invitation of a stranger to "get you into pictures" and suddenly finds himself behind the movie screen in the black-and-white world of the Silents: a Hollywood precisely as it was in the 1920's where love is the only subject matter but passion can be expressed solely within the censor's strict limits: where neither love nor death can last beyond the moment when the director says "Print That " Alys's love for the glamorous and elusive Moira Silver inevitably leads him to want to break out of this artificial world with her, back to garishly colourful Los Angeles. Screenplay is a novel as tauntingly erotic as it is brilliantly imaginative--a mysterious and captivating novel that, while unique in itself, shares the magic of John Fowles's The Magus and Nabokov's Pale Fire.Actor and writer Simon Callow has long been a huge fan of this writer - and in particular this book - and has written a fascinating Afterword. Callow has always longed to make a movie.

MacDonald Harris's posthumously published novel is set in the 1920's against a backdrop of airships, mysticism, erotic love and a Europe that is picking itself up after WW1. The League of Nations is a giant airship constructed by the same factory in Germany that made the Zeppelins, and is owned by Moira, the leader of a semi-religious cult. The captain is Georg von Plautus, a Prussian WW1 Zeppelin commander who harbours a terrible secret from a bombing raid over London in 1916. Moira's followers have embarked with her on an extraordinary voyage in this airship to a place that she calls Giaconda. The novel explores the lives of these characters on board taking the reader through a heady mix of sexual entanglements, metaphysics, and Blavatsky and Swedenborg influenced s ances. Towards the end of the novel it is apparent that all of Moira;s devotees have one thing in common. This is perhaps MacDonald Harris' most surprising novel, even bearing in mind that each one of his 15 published novels never failed to surprise the reader of the preceding one. The Carp Castle was completed shortly before his death in 1993 and seems to have disappeared at this time. Its re-emergence followed the very successful re-publication of his most successful book The Balloonist which left critics in the UK asking for more, and is part of the renaissance of this immensely talented writer who had so many followers and critical admirers in the 1980's.

Here is a delight: MacDonald Harris's colourful, fanciful, and moving Herma, the story of a willful young woman who conquers the musical world of the Belle Epoque. Herma is many things: a glamorous story of a singer who rises from the choir of a country church to stardom at the Paris Opera: the parallel adventures of her agent and friendly enemy Fred Hite, filled with the excitement of the early days of aviation; and a provocative sexual intrigue whose twinned her and heroine, not brother and sister, are forbidden to each other by the secret that lies at the center of their odd and intimate relationship. From its evocative beginnings in the pastoral Southern California of the turn of the century, Herma moves on to larger worlds: first the brash, adolescent San Francisco of the period, then the Earthquake, then the international world of opera in Paris at the most luxurious, opulent, and decadent moment of its history. Erotic, bejeweled, crowded with incident and a big, vivid cast of characters, Herma is MacDonald Harris's richest and most complex novel.

A merchant seaman is the sole survivor when his ship is sunk in a battle in the South Pacific. Badly burned, he is stripped of every shred of identity and cast into the sea, naked, faceless, nameless. Rescued and lying in a Pearl Harbor hospital, he is mistakenly identified as the missing Lt. Ben Davenant by Davenant's wife. In a moment, the man decides to go along, to take on Davenant's identity, to return with her to California and take on his life.Mortal Leap may remind some readers of the story of Don Draper in the TV series Mad Men. What does it mean to abandon one life completely and step into another in midstream? To step into a marriage, a house, a way of life, all of which are utterly new and unfamiliar? And what do you do when someone from your old life shows up?Decades before Mad Men, MacDonald Harris created a story that we all know but have never heard before. Out of print for decades, Mortal Leap has become a rare and coveted cult classic, the few remaining copies passed along from reader to reader. Now, Boiler House Press's Recovered Books series makes this remarkable book available again.

From Simon & Schuster, Hemingway's Suitcase is MacDonald Harris' novel about a writer claiming to have a suitcase containing a part of a novel and 20 or so novels by the great Ernest Hemingway. Nils-Frederik Glas, a talented eccentric, succeeds in publishing a collection of stories that may or may not actually be the lost "early works" of Ernest Hemingway.

Lightly drawing on Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, the acclaimed author of Hemingway's Suitcase sets his story against the eccentricities and decadences of a wealthy California beach community. At the center is a rich widower who counted his late wife among his most valuable possessions. Harry hopes to possess his new, powerfully sexual housekeeper, but finally encounters his own complicated fate.

Like Graham Greene and Mary McCarthy before him, MacDonald Harris has written a thriller. And like them, he brings to his story the alchemical talent of a first-class novelist: The Treasure of Sainte Foy is not only gripping, but also transcendent. In the picturesque, isolated French village of Conques stands the Abbey of Sainte Foy. The church houses a priceless medieval treasure whose centerpiece is a magnificent, three-foot-high statue of the holy martyr Sainte Foy, bejeweled and covered with gold, its strange alabaster eyes gazing ahead as if at a nearby invisible world. To a small group of political terrorists in Toulouse, the treasure is an irresistible target. Working with them is Patrick, a disaffected American art historian, who recruits into the band Marie-Ange, the guide to the church. We see their methodical preparations for the robbery, the growing attraction between Patrick and Marie-Ange, the implacable pursuit of the police--all cool, dramatic, and passionate as a Bogart film. But we also sense the mysterious underworld of the Languedoc, a region of heretics and saints, criminals and martyrs; the stakes of the novel subtly change and ramify; we are caught up in a gorgeous and mystical endgame as the forces of retribution close in; we get the uncanny feeling that at play in the novel are forces unseen and unseeable. What is really at play, of course, is the masterful hand of MacDonald Harris. A native Californian, Harris is best known for The Balloonist, nominated for the National Book Award and translated into half a dozen language, and Pandora's Galley, his mesmerizing tale of the last days of the Venetian Republic. In The Treasure of Sainte Foy, Harris has written a novel that is spellbinding in every sense of the world.