Some Sonnets of Flame & Flower - Softcover

Sherwood, James Webster

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0966196104 ISBN 13: 9780966196108

Publisher: OPUS PUB, 1998

Synopsis

Opus Books was born from a dream of the author as publisher in the tradition of Shakespeare, Beethoven, Balzac, Dickens, Whitman, Twain & Chaplin, to preserve literary quality and individual expression dedicated to that which shocks the soul but reveals who wrote the works which began in censorship.

About this title

From the Publisher:

Since 1954, the author wrote and gave to friends his Sonnets, now gathered here for everyone as published in Some Sonnets of Flame & Flower, an occasion that has "positively overgasted and flabberwhelmed" the world, the likes of which sure would be noted.

About the Author:

James Webster Sherwood was born in Hollywood in 1936. He went to the Choate School and at thirteen wrote his first novel, The House of Spades. Three years later, becoming a full-time reporter in San Francisco, he wrote for five newspapers simultaneously, using pen names, and by the age of nineteen had become the youngest editor and syndicated columnist in California. His first book, 101 Sonnets of Sex, God, the Circus & Love was published in 1959, praised by San Francisco poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and became an instant bestseller. Two years later the novel Stradella received international recognition when published by The Olympia Press in Paris, The Grove Press in New York, and in 1965 was banned in London by Act of Parliament for its sexual content. When issued there in 1966 it became the fastest seller in British history, topping Dickens' Little Dorrit with 100,000 copies sold in one week, and went on to sell 1.3 million copies world-wide. It remains in print to this day, featured in The Olympia Reader, described by Robert Kirsch in the Los Angeles Times as "the Sunset Strip novel par excellence, a very nearly perfect rendition of the people and places of that unlikely community. A geography of the grotesque." Stradella was celebrated in the underground of the 1960's as a counter-culture comedy, becoming a landmark in battle against censorship of sexual writing. The author withdrew from publishing to begin the revision of a series of novels known as The Hollywood Opera: Hotstroke, Little Judy, Dining On Thorns, Blood Relations, Carnal Grounds. He translated and edited the only surviving interview with novelist L-F Celine, which was issued by The Paris Review and, in preface to translator Ralph Manheim's Castle to Castle which won the 1970 National Book Award for Best Translation. In New York Sherwood went on to edit over 400 paperback novels; but in 1972 he founded a luxury limousine service which pioneered standards establishing it as a national leader. Inevitably he returned to writing and was given the first John Dos Passos Award for Creative Writing when a comedy verse play, The Wooed Wife, was presented Off Broadway in 1988..

About this edition

• Publisher: OPUS PUB
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0966196104
• ISBN 13: 9780966196108
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 112