MacDonald Harris – författare

From Simon & Schuster, Hemingway's Suitcase is MacDonald Harris' novel about a writer claiming to have a suitcase containing a part of a novel and 20 or so novels by the great Ernest Hemingway.Nils-Frederik Glas, a talented eccentric, succeeds in publishing a collection of stories that may or may not actually be the lost "early works" of Ernest Hemingway.

Here is a delight: MacDonald Harris's colourful, fanciful, and moving Herma, the story of a wilful young woman who conquers the musical world of the Belle Epoque. Herma is many things: a glamorous story of a singer who rises from the choir of a country church to stardom at the Paris Opera: the parallel adventures of her agent and friendly enemy Fred Hite, filled with the excitement of the early days of aviation; and a provocative sexual intrigue whose twinned her and heroine, not brother and sister, are forbidden to each other by the secret that lies at the centre of their odd and intimate relationship. From its evocative beginnings in the pastoral Southern California of the turn of the century, Herma moves on to larger worlds: first the brash, adolescent San Francisco of the period, then the Earthquake, then the international world of opera in Paris at the most luxurious, opulent, and decadent moment of its history. Erotic, bejewelled, crowded with incident and a big, vivid cast of characters, Herma is MacDonald Harris's richest and most complex novel.

MacDonald Harris's posthumously published novel is set in the 1920's against a backdrop of airships, mysticism, erotic love and a Europe that is picking itself up after WW1. The League of Nations is a giant airship constructed by the same factory in Germany that made the Zeppelins, and is owned by Moira, the leader of a semi-religious cult. The captain is Georg von Plautus, a Prussian WW1 Zeppelin commander who harbours a terrible secret from a bombing raid over London in 1916. Moira's followers have embarked with her on an extraordinary voyage in this airship to a place that she calls Giaconda. The novel explores the lives of these characters on board taking the reader through a heady mix of sexual entanglements, metaphysics, and Blavatsky and Swedenborg influenced seances. Towards the end of the novel it is apparent that all of Moira's devotees have one thing in common. This is perhaps MacDonald Harris' most surprising novel, even bearing in mind that each one of his 15 published novels never failed to surprise the reader of the preceding one. The Carp Castle was completed shortly before his death in 1993 and seems to have disappeared at this time. Its re-emergence followed the very successful re-publication of his most successful book The Balloonist which left critics in the UK asking for more, and is part of the renaissance of this immensely talented writer who had so many followers and critical admirers in the 1980's

A merchant seaman is the sole survivor when his ship is sunk in a battle in the South Pacific. Badly burned, he is stripped of every shred of identity and cast into the sea, naked, faceless, nameless. Rescued and lying in a Pearl Harbor hospital, he is mistakenly identified as the missing Lt. Ben Davenant by Davenant's wife. In a moment, the man decides to go along, to take on Davenant's identity, to return with her to California and take on his life.Mortal Leap may remind some readers of the story of Don Draper in the TV series Mad Men. What does it mean to abandon one life completely and step into another in midstream? To step into a marriage, a house, a way of life, all of which are utterly new and unfamiliar? And what do you do when someone from your old life shows up?Decades before Mad Men, MacDonald Harris created a story that we all know but have never heard before. Out of print for decades, Mortal Leap has become a rare and coveted cult classic, the few remaining copies passed along from reader to reader. Now, Boiler House Press's Recovered Books series makes this remarkable book available again.

In 1976 Farrar Strauss in the USA and Gollancz in the UK, published the 5th novel by an American writer who had been gathering momentum on both sides of the Atlantic. It was both an intense love story and a Jules Verne-type science fiction adventure, centred on an attempt by a Swedish scientist, an American journalist and a French speaking adventurer to become the first people to set foot on the North Pole. To arrive there and return, borne on the wind by a huge red and white hydrogen balloon. The book was a critical sensation, and was runner up for the National Book Awards in 1977. What was not known at the time of first publication, nor indeed when Galileo reissued this extraordinary book in 2011, was that the author had actually based this fiction on a real event: the 1897 attempt by S. A Andree to fly to the North Pole. This is a new edition, the first in a uniform presentation of selected Harris works.