King David Dances

In 1933, Yeats wrote about the young Francis Stuart's second book that it was ""more personally and beautifully written than any book of our generation,"" and added a very prophetic line: ""If luck comes to his aid he will be our great writer."" Born in 1902, Stuart became one of Ireland's most controversial artists, a modern novelist of ideas more akin to the European models of Camus or Koestler. Branded a fascist maverick because he left Ireland to teach at the University of Berlin during World War II and due to his ambivalent political associations with Nazi Germany, his books were banned until Victor Gollancz began publishing him again in the 1940s. Frank Kermode called him ""exceptional...to put it mildly a writer of originality...often funny as well as shocking,"" and Victoria Glendinning called Stuart a ""powerful and interesting writer...because he writes passionately."" At the age of 94 Stuart wrote this new novella. Purporting to be the diary of the Irish-Hungarian archaeologist, Lodsi Dormondi, King David Dances is both a self-survival manual and instructional booklet for the cosmos. Provocative, playful, and compassionate, this remarkable new work is evidence of the extraordinary talent and invincible spirit of one of Ireland's most important writers of this century.

Purporting to be the diary of the Irish-Hungarian archaeologist, Lodsi Dormondi, King David Dances is both a self-survival manual and instructional booklet for the cosmos. Opening with the miraculous discovery of the Ark of the Covenant in modern-day Judaea, these witty dispatches constitute a droll commentary on the miracle of life itself: an off-beat look at everything from horse-racing and Heidegger to the tyranny of consensus and corn flakes. This new novella from Francis Stuart is further evidence of the talent and spirit of one of this century's most important Irish novelists.