Never before published in the United States, this brilliant and startlingly American novel presents a Yankee tycoon's explosive career paralleling the boom-and-bust Twentieth Century. By the American-educated English author of the outrageous novel I Hear Voices, it was published originally in 1977 but only in Great Britain, where it was hailed by the likes of Anthony Burgess and Auberon Waugh, among scads of others. The eponymous main character is not likely to win kudos for political correctness, since his story is something of a fictional cross between Hunter Thompson and P.J. O'Rourke. This autobiographical narrative express leaps out as one of the premier novels told in first-person deranged.

At once confined and liberated by his madness, the hero and narrator of I Hear Voices takes us on journeys through his private, transfigured city. The vehicle is his own deranged mind, fueled by the absurdities of modern life. Lovers of Beckett and Ionesco will recognize much in Paul Abelman's world, where the fantastic and the real coexist in a hilarious, disquieting detente. This first American edition brings to a new audience a literary masterpiece which was originally published in 1958 by Olympia Press in Paris; and, in fact, Maurice Girodias, who was also responsible for first issuing Lolita and The Ginger Man, claimed that I Hear Voices was the book that gave him the greatest pleasure to publish.