Lance Lee – författare

Orpheus Rising is a sparkling immersion in adventures of great beauty, danger, and the unexpected, with a climax that will move anyone to a sense of joy. A daring retelling of the Orpheus legend in modern guise, Sam and his father, John, set off to rescue Sam''s lost mother, Madelyn, from "The Far Land of Fear" and "Dread City", a startling, imaginative view of the afterlife. A fantasy set in terms of Sam''s 10 going on 11 imagination, they are joined by Lepanto, a very wise Elephant who likes to dance, dressed in Edwardian elegance, through a series of adventures with a most unexpected ending.

Children will enjoy the sheer inventiveness of the story-telling, and adults the unexpected depths of Sam and his father''s journey to the completion of

their hearts'' desire... Lee is also a poet whose output has been called "visionary" "vibrant" "a voice beyond epoch" variously compared to Browning, Auden, and in its freedom, Neruda. A playwright too, he has brought characters to life as diverse as Rasputin and the last fox in Los Angeles... His texts of screenwriting and drama remain popular in their fields as well.

Martin Bax, Editor, Ambit, England''s leading Arts Quarterly; author, The Hospital Ship

Being male and keeping some balance of mind and heart is eloquently explored in Lance Lee''s Becoming Human. "The years have planted multitudes in my heart" he says, and accepting adulthood''s sorrows and corruptions while moving on with one''s life is a continual step-by-small-step act of heroism. It is wonderful to read a poetry that does not fear to feel, nor softens and delays the fierce depths of experience with mere agreeable anecdote or trendy nostalgia. From the child in his crib, to the boy running from the wolf beneath the stairs, from desire''s greed for beauty and solace, to acknowledging the "German" and the "Jew''s" joint contribution to his genetics, Lee''s poems ask that we attend to that continual interior warfare which is the stuff of humanity. With his richly sensuous diction, Lance Lee tackles head on questions of love with all its dignities of aspiration and indignities of the reflective, divided self. This is an honest book, and one of the most passionate documents of the masculine heart around. Our heroic insufficiencies are acknowledged and embraced. This book moves from memory to landscape, into Dante''s mind, across Italy and into Dachau. Becoming Human is a rare book; it takes time to savor and while the poet continually hungers, the poems consistently nourish. This is a book to read time and again; it''s grown-up; it''s real - uncompromising and very beautiful.

Pamela Stewart, The Red Window; Infrequent Mysteries

What immediately draws me into this book is the urgency and honesty with which Lance lee explores the self and its parameters. He writes about childhood when a wolf "lived beneath the stairs" whose "breath singed my legs before/I leaped to the safety of the steps," and of how when waking to terror at night, "I learned I was alone/and became human." He is deeply aware of family history, his mixed gentile and Jewish background and he examines, often through dream and vision, his attitudes and feelings. He looks unflinchingly at his own feral nature, the bear that''s "my familiar stranger" - a desire to be powerful, destructive, taste pleasure and "wild freedom". There is too an extraordinary empathy with wildlife, a celebration of it, and the questioning of self and God, the spirituality which underlies all this work, is particularly moving in the nature poems. "The Wheatfield" ends:

The energy of Lee''s writing, its sensuousness and passion is, for me, the true stuff of poetry. He deserves to be much better known.

Nyra Schneider, Insisting on Yellow ? New and Selected Poems; Panic Bird

FAMILY MATTERS is a generations long reckoning with family myth, loss and transformation from the end of the Civil War into the 1970s, showing how family suffering metamorphosized into comedy on an abiding public, cultural scale in the original The Addams Familytelevision series of 1964-1966 created by the author''s father, David Levy, from the original Charles Addams New Yorker cartoons. It is also the story of how the author''s parents though drawn from widely divergent backgrounds strove to realize the American Dream. Levy''s ancestors derived from Jewish Eastern Europe, Lucile Wilds'' from Germany and Anglo-Welsh aristocracy. The breakdown of that effort both as a slow ebbing and with an abrupt jolt provides the narrative drive and climax of FAMILY MATTERS.

David Levy rose to prominence in radio in We The People which in WWII reached half of America''s households, then after a detour in the wartime Treasury Department running War Bond drives, in television as one of its pioneers, eventually becoming Head of Programming at NBC and lifting that network to the first rank with shows like Dr. Kildare and Bonanza while bringing Hollywood to television with Saturday Night At The Movies. The Addams Family climaxed his career, one of the creation of fantasies publicly rewarded.

Lucille Wilds married him multiple times, publicly in 1942, a perfect match for a husband striving against antisemitism and for acceptance in the then largely WASP world of the great advertising agencies, the source of creative content for radio and early TV. She was "Queen of the Models" in the 1930s and 1940s, "The Models'' Miss America of 1939," and the country''s "Dream Girl" of 1940" who became the supreme hostess David Levy needed at his side-and as time passed, the Ultimate Mother, Master Builder, and dominant force within her family she learned to shield from his.... That their union lasted nearly thirty years despite their divisions is a testament to the power of love to override glaring opposites, for a time....

FAMILY MATTERS traces the links between private and public, myth and fact, reality and the transformations we all make to understand ourselves and the ideals we raise from our warring strands of inheritance and experience.