Gerald Kersh – författare

'[Gerald Kersh] is a story-teller of an almost vanished kind - though the proper description is perhaps a teller of 'rattling good yarns'... He is fascinated by the grotesque and the bizarre, by the misfits of life, the angry, the down-and-outs and the damned. A girl of eight commits a murder. Some circus freaks are shipwrecked on an island. A chess champion walks in his sleep and destroys the games he has so carefully planned...' TLS 'Beneath his talented lightness and fantasy, Gerald Kersh is a serious man... [He] has the ability... to create a world which is not realistic and which is yet entirely credible and convincing on its own fantastic terms.' New York Times'Mr Kersh tells a story; as such, rather better than anybody else.' Pamela Hansford Johnson, Telegraph

'It is a quality of flamboyant vigour in Mr Kersh that wins attention first of all for his fiction, and more especially, perhaps, for his occasional short story. When his flamboyant energy of sentiment and language comes off he achieves an effect of genuine distinction; at his surest, that is, he is a short story writer of a strongly individual and rewarding kind... the best and cleverest [of the 23 stories in this volume] tells with excellent economy of a ventriloquist's dummy which was inhabited, or so it seemed, by the spirit of the ventriloquist's murdered father... 'The Drunk And The Blind', the sketch of an old, battered and mentally ruined boxer, is done with a telling and slightly brutal power. 'The Devil That Troubled The Chess-Board'... is another sound thing in a vein of the slightly macabre.' Times Literary Supplement (1944)

'[This] is the story of the beginning and the end of St Paul, that most complicated and worrying of all the saints. The narrator is Diomed, a colonial officer stationed at Tarsus, enlightened, intelligent, a great fraterniser with the patrician natives, [who] sends the strange young Jew to persecute the Nazarenes... [Kersh brings] a highly concentrated area of Roman colonial history to very real life - the ornate wine-cup, the crapulous cold fruit-juice at dawn, dust on a sandal... King Jesus is here, all the time... the fly-itch nuisance to the Empire that wakes its prefects up in nightmare... This is a masterly book, full of live people and a live age, live language, too... We may adjudge Mr Kersh, after reading The Implaccable Hunter, to be now at the height of his powers.' Anthony Burgess, Yorkshire Post, 1961

Night and the City (1938) made Gerald Kersh's reputation, but it was as a war novelist that he reached a wide readership in 1942, via a pair of books about British army recruits, led by Sergeant Bill Nelson, preparing to see service in France. This Faber Finds edition collects both books.'[They Die With Their Boots Clean] is a picture of life in the raw in the Coldstream Guards, with all itsrigorous discipline, its humour and comradeship.' TLS[In The Nine Lives Of Bill Nelson] the conversations are terse, ferociously slangy, full of hyperbole and outrageous wit, often irresistibly funny.' TLS[Kersh] has sure magic in taking us through the training of raw recruits... Each man's story is briefly and dramatically told, the episodes are vigorous, and Nelson holds the centre of the stage, as he leads the battered troops over 63 miles of French territory to Dunkirk...' Kirkus Reviews

With The Song Of The Flea (1948) Gerald Kersh revisited the demi-monde of his famous Night And The City; but this novel concerns a writer, striving doggedly to make his living.'A remarkable novel... with this book Mr Kersh has taken a big step forward.' Sunday Times'[Kersh] has a remarkable talent... he is one of the comparatively few living novelists in this country who write with energy and originality and whose ideas are not drawn from a residuum of novels that have been written before... [The Song of the Flea] is the story of John Pym, a young man trying to earn his living as a writer... Mr Kersh draws on his picturesque and convincing knowledge of human vileness in a manner which is both entertaining and instructive.' Times Literary Supplement.

'The Thousand Deaths Of Mr Small is the best novel that Gerald Kersh has yet written... Charles Small, successful advertising expert and miserable man, turns over in his mind the 'stinking, sour, stagnant, untransmitted mass' which is his life... This book has a rich, warm quality; long and full of detail, it teems with humour, satire, incident, character; in a word, with life.' Yorkshire Post'It see-saws from side-splitting dialogue to such catalogues of loathing and revulsion as have rarely been seen in print, from outrageous farce to sudden compassion for the Smalls of this world, who find Hell enough in 'the eternal contemplation of themselves as they made themselves.'' New York Herald Tribune'With brilliant descriptive power and an emetic vocabulary, [Kersh] has produced a tormented and forceful work.' Commonweal

Step right up to see the enchanted Ferris wheel whose magical gifts are to die for! Marvel at the man-eating menagerie and dreadful secrets of 'Satan's Circus'! Behold the nightmare waxworks of Mrs. Groby's Chamber of Horrors!Carnivals and sideshows are settings closely entwined with the history of horror cinema, but in the realms of literature, there is a strain of uncanny fairground fiction with even deeper roots. Home to a sinister troupe of conjurers, puppeteers, beast tamers and crowds baying for blood beneath the Big Top, the performance spaces of these classic weird tales are borderlands where the unearthly meets the darker cravings of the human heart.Presenting sixteen sensational short stories, hailing from Edgar Allan Poe's 1840s through to Robert Aickman's 1960s, Edward Parnell invites you to enjoy a cavalcade of uneasy thrills courtesy of Gerald Kersh, Ray Bradbury, Margery Lawrence and many more.