Bruce Paley

"BRUCE PALEY IS AN EXTRAORDINARY WRITER AND HIS OBROVSKY IS A DELIGHT: AN ORIGINAL LAUGH-OUT-LOUD COMEDY...THE SITUATIONS ARE OUTRAGEOUS, BUT FOLLOWING THE EFFORTS OF THE ALL-TOO-HUMAN PROTAGANISTS IS A JOY".

So says The Dice Man author Luke Rhinehart, about Bruce Paley's new novel The Obrovsky Theatre co. of Blaznivyzeme, a satirical black comedy that follows the attempts of a troupe of dwarves to mount a production of Hamlet in a fictitious Eastern European country as it makes a difficult transition from communism to capitalism. Lured out of retirement to play the lead is Jiri Bloudin, a brilliant, charismatic actor known in his country as The Miniature Marlon Brando. Jiri also has a well-earned reputation for being a womaniser, and is an unrepentant abuser of drugs and alcohol, and rumour has it that he is washed up.

The book is now available on Kindle.

Now living in Pembrokeshire, Wales, Bruce Paley is a native New Yorker and a child of the '60s who came to London in 1986 for a two week holiday that has since stretched into the present day, 30 years and counting. In London, Bruce and his partner, the cartoonist Carol swain, ran a seasonal bookstall at the Hampstead Community Centre for 10 years, where Bruce also ran the weekend market. Being Hampstead, their clientele included numerous writers and celebrities, from John Le Carre to David Baddiel and Russell Brand. Come wintertime, Bruce and Carol would relocate to Wales, where Carol was raised, and after going back and forth for several years, they finally made the big move and permanently relocated to Pembrokeshire, where they live in a small rural village, surrounded by hills and fields filled with sheep, cows, and horses - a far cry from the gritty streets of the Lower East Side of New York, where Bruce was born!

In 2009, Bruce and Carol collaborated on the graphic novel Giraffes in my Hair: A Rock'n'Roll Life (Fantagraphics), which recounts Bruce's adventures as a carefree, Kerouac-loving hippie in the 1960s, through to his later involvement in the heroin-soaked downtown New York punk scene of the 1970s, a journey that mirrors the optimism of the '60s giving way to the pessimism of the '70s. The reviews were overwhelmingly positive, with more than one reviewer calling it the best graphic novel of the year, while USA Today predicted that it would be turned into a film (though we're still waiting for that phone call!). French and Spanish translations of "Giraffes" have also been published.

Bruce's previous book, Jack the Ripper: The Simple Truth (Headline), was recently named the best book ever written on that tireless subject by the editors of the Journal of the Whitechapel Society, an organisation dedicated to all things Jack the Ripper. Besides setting out in considerable detail Bruce's original theory as to the identity of Jack the Ripper, the book has been cited for it's exceptionally vivid evocation of Victorian London. As Colin Wilson wrote in his foreword to the book: "If I had to recommend a single book on Jack the Ripper to someone who knew nothing of the subject, I would unhesitatingly choose this one. Bruce Paley has captured the atmosphere of Whitechapel at the time of the murders - and indeed, of London in the late 19th century - with a sense of living reality that no other write on the case has achieved." An updated version of the book, featuring a new Afterword and an interview with Bruce, is currently available on Kindle. After that, Bruce wrote a London-set crime novel entitled A Dog to Kick, featuring his creation DCI Richard Greene, which is also available on Kindle .

In 2012, Bruce received a grant from Literature Wales to complete Obrovsky.

Among his many jobs, Bruce has worked as a New York cab driver, a private detective, a horse wrangler, a comic shop owner, and a vendor at Shea Stadium, where in 1965 he got to see The Beatles. The first story he ever wrote, entitled Smileaway, was published in the July 1972 issue of Amazing Science Fiction. A passionate fan of 60s and 70s rock music, Bruce has also written on the subject for journals such as the Village Voice, the Soho Weekly News, Crawdaddy, and Trouser Press in the States, and Uncut and Classic Rock in the UK. He is also a keen photographer who has had his work exhibited in New York and elsewhere. Bruce has recently assembled a series of photos he took of the eerie interiors of derelict Welsh homes, with their ghostly traces of previous occupants, which he has matched with a number of poems by Welsh poets. The project is called Unremembered Things, from the poem by the Welsh poet Waldo Williams.

Carol Swain's latest graphic novel is entitled Gast. It tells the story of a young English girl relocated to the Welsh countryside, where she becomes intrigued by the suicide of a local, reclusive, cross-dressing farmer. The people she speaks to, however, know little about the man, and it is up to his animals to fill her in on the farmer's life. Carol is currently working on a "novel with photographs" entitled Beulah, and is open to publishing offers.