Turtle Point Press – förlag

Told as much through images as through words, a young Nepalese man’s globe-spanning relationship with "the father of American surrealism" changes the course of his life and gives him a new set of roots.

In 1973, poet, photographer, collage artist, and sculptorCharles Henri Ford convinced ayoung Nepalese waiter at his hotel in Kathmandu to come work as his all-purposehelper. Nineteen-year-old Indra Tamang, who spoke minimal English, was soonenjoying an education and a life he could not have imagined. He quicklygraduated from cooking and running errands to attending social engagements withCharles, to accompanying the artist on his international travels, eventuallybecoming his collaborator, and more of a son than an employee.

Charles was a magnet for creative people, and during the ’70s,’80s, and ’90s, Indra found himself at the center of seemingly every fantasticlittle universe in New York, Paris, Crete, and Kathmandu, often as a quietobserver taking photographs and making mental notes. There was Studio 54, AndyWarhol’s Factory, the teas that Charles would host at the Dakota, attended byregulars such as Tennessee Williams, Quentin Crisp, Patti Smith, and HenryGeldzahler; there were special dinners at the United Nations; visits to MaryMcCarthy and Leonor Fini; and chats in the elevator with neighbors like Johnand Yoko and Lauren Bacall. Charles gave Indra a second upbringing, one thatIndra absorbed with tremendous curiosity and enthusiasm. In turn, Indra broughtCharles into his family’s village in Nepal, introducing him to a world that notmany Westerners were privileged to see, especially then. Indra managed to shuttlebetween these two vastly different worlds, marrying and having children inNepal, though not revealing this to Charles for quite some years.

In 2010, Indra Tamang became the object of globalfascination after inheriting two apartments from Charles’s sister, the actressRuth Ford. The story in the Wall Street Journal described a Nepalese “butler”who “grew up in a mud hut” and ended up owning property in one of New York’smost famous buildings. The attention that followed inspired Indra to write thisricher and more accurate account of his life. Illustrated with more than 100 photographs and ephemera from the private collections of Charles and Indra, some never before shown, and gathered together for the first time,readers will discover that nothing about Indra’s “curious years” with Charlesand his friends was ordinary or predictable in anyway. 

“[Delaney] cares about details and understands their importance to the larger themes of loss, desperation, and betrayed loyalties. His characters are . . . fully realized, familiar people, whose failures are heartbreakingly authentic.” —The Boston Globe

A Bureau of Indian Affairs agent in a remote Wyoming reservation reckons with the clash of cultures, his own failings, and the attempted destruction of a people. 

Five teenagers take a joyride through the barren landscape of a small Wyoming reservation. Only four survive. It’s 1958, and the death triggers years of pent-up tensions between the town of Suncreek and the members of the Towuk tribe. The locals barely subsist in a tenuous small-town existence; the Towuk are still mourning the loss of their long-gone way of life. The white residents of Suncreek deeply resent what they see as the Towuk tribe’s windfall—oil deposits that have turned the desolate reservation into something of sudden value. But the tribe struggles with its newfound money, which has brought them a modicum of wealth for which they have been swindled and abused. 

The town’s sheriff threatens to make an example of the teenage driver, Nelson Antelope. Tim Hubbard of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a troubled Korean War vet, acts to thwart that effort and protect the boy. Shut out by the tribe, Hubbard finds guidance in the archived reports from an earlier agent named Dorrance. A protégé of Horace Greeley and his Utopianism, Dorrance was recruited to make farmers out of a horse-borne nomadic tribe—and thus force hard boundaries on how and where they could exist. The dual tales of Hubbard and Dorrance chronicle these conflicted stewards and the devastating toll their reluctant mission takes on a culture not their own.

Morally complex and fully relevant to today’s issues of freedom and land occupation, Hard Margins is about captive people and their desire to escape their fates, and the captors who desire just as fervently to escape theirs. 

"Scintillating." —Edmund White 

"A furtive treasure of the American avant-garde." —Publishers Weekly

“A remarkably realized work of art.” —Matthew Stadler

“Delaney[‘s] splendid fictional biography of Cary Grant . . . perfectly befits the glamour and fakery of his subject.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Everyone wants to be Cary Grant,” mused the world’s most famous leading man. Even I want to be Cary Grant.”

It’s 1959, and the 55-year-old man who calls himself Cary Grant is at the peak of a charmed career. He’s also on a turbulent journey to find the core of a self he hardly seems to know anymore. Introduced to the wonder drug LSD as part of his therapy at The Psychiatric Institute of Beverly Hills, he embarks on upward of one hundred psychedelic trips—at times harrowing journeys. And on the way, he rediscovers the long-ago boy who faced the world as Archie Leach, the earnest, gap-toothed stilt walker and tumbler he once was, long ago.

     In The Acrobat, fiction writer Edward J. Delaney takes on the elusive character of Cary Grant. He imagines the inner life of a man who spent a career brilliantly creating a persona as ethereal as his best roles. As Grant launches on LSD-fueled trajectories of discovery, The Acrobat likewise transports readers through his fractured upbringing, his start in English vaudeville, his life on the Hollywood sets, and his relationships with fellow travelers prominent in his life: Howard Hughes, Randolph Scott, Blake Edwards, Tony Curtis, two of the five women he married, and more. Amid the endless versions of himself and the characters he’s played, he yearns to shape himself into something singular, forged from the layers of illusion he’s smilingly foisted on the world, and for which the world has come to love him. This riveting dramatization of the actor’s life takes us beyond the firm terrain that biographies tread, to offer a new perspective on a complex Hollywood legend.