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Product Description Capital Castles finally concludes the journey initiated in Cardboard Castles and continued in Cloud Castles. As in the previous tw
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o novels, Capital Castles takes Duncan Katz on yet another quest for entertainment and edification as he journeys from the United States to Holland to Paris and back to the United States where the journey began. New and old characters appear: the ubiquitous Thanatos; Samuel Beckett; baseball Hall of Famer, Richie Ashburn; the Statue of Liberty; Jefferson's slave and concubine, Sally Hemings and her brother, true author of the Declaration of Independence, Vasiariah Hemings; the blind Chicago bus driver, T.R. Esias; the phlegmatic, Grand Interpreter; and, of course, Hadara Halevi, Duncan's wife. In Capital Castles, Axelrod spares no ironic expense on the United States and the history of its social, economic and political malfeasance. From the opening acknowledgment to the gracious solicitations to the multi-international corporations for sponsoring the novel to the playing of the Star Spangled Banner to sanctify the novel to Duncan's intimate meeting with the Statue of Liberty to the true and authentic account of the creation of the Declaration of Independence, there's more than a sardonic glimmer of Twain-like sanctity to the novel. About the Author MARK AXELROD is a Full Professor of English & Comparative Literature at Chapman University, Orange, California. A graduate of both Indiana University and the University of Minnesota, he is the Director of the John Fowles Center for Creative Writing, he is a two-time recipient of a United Kingdom Leverhulme Fellowship for Creative Writing, a three-time recipient of the Alliance Française National Writing Award, has published four novels, Capital Castles (Pacific Writers Press, 2000), Cloud Castles (Pacific Writers Press, 1998), Cardboard Castles (Pacific Writers Press, 1996) and Bombay California (Pacific Writers Press, 1994)) and has finished a new, thousand-page Pan-American novel titled, The Posthumous Memoirs of Blase Kubash, based on the character created by the 19th century Brazilian novelist, Machado de Assis, excerpts of which have been anthologized in The Reading Room/4 published by Green Marsh Press. He has also written several collections of short stories titled: Borges Travel, Hemingways Garage (to be published by Fiction Collective 2 in April, 2004); Balzacs Coffee, Rembrandts Café (the sequel); Dantes Foil & Other Sporting Tales and The Apotheosis of Aaron and has been published in numerous journals including the Iowa Review, the New Novel Review and the New York Quarterly. A contributor to the former New York avant-garde magazine, Splash, he was a film reviewer for Vinyl Magazine (Minneapolis) and a music reviewer for Playboy. Among the awards he has won for his fiction include: the Tim McGinnis Award (University of Iowa); Camargo Foundation Fellowship in Fiction Writing, Cassis, France (2); the Maxwell Perkins Award for Fiction Writing, New York, NY; a Bush Foundation Fellowship for Fiction Writing, St. Paul, MN; and an Award for Experimental Writing (Indiana University). He has also won an award from Western Illinois University for his play, TI AMO LUCIA OLIVETTI, which is tentatively scheduled to be staged at the Jewish Theatre of Hamburg (Fall, 2003) and is currently working on a new play dealing with the life of Van Gogh. His critical books include, The Politics of Style in the Fiction of Balzac, Beckett and Cortázar (Macmillan, UK, 1990); The Poetics of Novels (Macmillan, UK, 1999) and is currently at work on a book titled Mismatch Dissolve: The Adaptation of Postmodern Fiction to Film. Other film books include: Aspects of the Screenplay (Heinemann, 2001); Character & Conflict: Cornerstones of Screenwriting (also being considered by Heinemann) and I Read It At the Movies: Screen Adaptation. His translations of Xavier de Maistres novella, Un voyage autour de ma chambre and Balzacs play, Mercadet
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