'What a great novel, its language and storytelling so light but also raw and lyrical. A tremendous writer. Read this book' ADRIAAN VAN DIS. Alan Noland discovers his father's memoirs and learns the truth about the violent man he despised. In this unsparing family history, Alan distils his father's life in the Dutch East Indies into one furious utterance. He reads about his work as an interpreter during the war with Japan, his life as an assassin, and his decision to murder Indonesians in the service of the Dutch without any conscience. How he fled to the Netherlands to escape being executed as a traitor and met Alan's mother soon after. As he reads his father's story Alan begins to understand how war transformed his father into the monster he knew. Birney exposes a crucial chapter in Dutch and European history that was deliberately concealed behind the ideological facade of postwar optimism. Readers of this superb novel will find that it reverberates long afterwards in their memory.

While famous for his celebrated novel, Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry always considered himself a poet. First published in 1962 and long out of print, Selected Poems of Malcolm Lowry is the only comprehensive selection of his poetry to be published, and it remains the perfect introduction to his extensive poetic canon. Edited by Lowry's good friend, renowned Canadian poet Earle Birney, with the assistance of his widow, Margerie Lowry, the selection includes extraordinary poems written during Lowry's stay in Mexico, many of which are closely related to his novel. This new edition includes a "Publisher's Note" from Lawrence Ferlinghetti. "These poems would be worth keeping in print, if for no other reason, for their illuminations of Under the Volcano: 'See mind's petal / torn from a good tree, but where shall it settle / But in the last darkness and at the end?' Sometimes, as the images of "For Under the Volcano," they become 'palm-of-the-hand' versions of that masterpiece. Lowry is a poet of struggle--with life, and with the creative process. Here are his struggle's fruits: guilt, alcoholism, hopeless, self-deriding quest for salvation, which seems to be love, and, above all, self-destruction--but always accomplished with self-knowledge, enriched (in order to further torment itself) with compassion for all the beings that the poet, and us with him, are failing. His words are always sad and often beautiful."-William T. Vollman

'What a great novel, its language and storytelling so light but also raw and lyrical. A tremendous writer. Read this book' ADRIAAN VAN DIS. Alan Noland discovers his father's memoirs and learns the truth about the violent man he despised. In this unsparing family history, Alan distils his father's life in the Dutch East Indies into one furious utterance. He reads about his work as an interpreter during the war with Japan, his life as an assassin, and his decision to murder Indonesians in the service of the Dutch without any conscience. How he fled to the Netherlands to escape being executed as a traitor and met Alan's mother soon after. As he reads his father's story Alan begins to understand how war transformed his father into the monster he knew. Birney exposes a crucial chapter in Dutch and European history that was deliberately concealed behind the ideological facade of postwar optimism. Readers of this superb novel will find that it reverberates long afterwards in their memory.

'What a great novel, its language and storytelling so light but also raw and lyrical. A tremendous writer. Read this book' ADRIAAN VAN DIS. Alan Noland discovers his father's memoirs and learns the truth about the violent man he despised. In this unsparing family history, Alan distils his father's life in the Dutch East Indies into one furious utterance. He reads about his work as an interpreter during the war with Japan, his life as an assassin, and his decision to murder Indonesians in the service of the Dutch without any conscience. How he fled to the Netherlands to escape being executed as a traitor and met Alan's mother soon after. As he reads his father's story Alan begins to understand how war transformed his father into the monster he knew. Birney exposes a crucial chapter in Dutch and European history that was deliberately concealed behind the ideological facade of postwar optimism. Readers of this superb novel will find that it reverberates long afterwards in their memory.