First published in 1962 As Near as I Can Get was Paul Ableman's follow up to his critically acclaimed debut I Hear Voices. Following Alan Peebles, a young man struggling to become a poet, As Near as I Can depicts a mid-twentieth century London of offices, pubs and lodgings. Fuelled by drink through these desperate years, the narrator charts his encounters with women and fellow artists, as he seeks to glimpse a wonder in life barely discernible beneath the routine of every day. 'Paul Ableman's novels were praised for their inventive language, bawdy high spirits, and originality of form by Anthony Burgess, Philip Toynbee, Robert Nye and other friends of the avant-garde. They are witty, original, and full of good humour, and I am delighted Faber Finds are reissuing them.' Margaret Drabble

'This book seems to be about us. Within a day or two of starting it I devised a title: VAC... The subtle idea was to fuse the suggestion of holiday or vacation with that of vacuum...' Paul Ableman's third novel, first published in 1968, is - through the voice of its narrator Billy Soodernim, libidinous and regretful by turns - a meditation on love and carnality, monogamy and promiscuity, childbirth, separation and indeed the whole of the fraught relations between the sexes: 'male and female, citizens with distinct personalities, flesh inwraught in flesh.' 'Paul Ableman's novels were praised for their inventive language, bawdy high spirits, and originality of form by Anthony Burgess, Philip Toynbee, Robert Nye and other friends of the avant-garde. They are witty, original, and full of good humour, and I am delighted Faber Finds are reissuing them.' Margaret Drabble

The hero of Paul Ableman's Vilp (1962) is Clive Witt, a novelist in search of a hero for his new novel. He advertises for suitable applicants, and from seventy-three replies he selects three: Professor Guthrie Pidge, a zoologist; Pad Dee Murphy, an Irish-Burmese peasant; and Harry Glebe, the inventor of the renowned earth-borer. Clive's novel, though, progresses slowly. His three heroes refuse to mix their very disparate elements into a harmonious whole. Eventually, Clive scraps it and harnesses his team of heroes to a new work, an exciting science fiction tale called The Silver Spores. In this, mankind meets the Vilp! The novel ends with the 5,000 strong Vilp Galactic Council communing in space at an incredibly high telepathic level. 'Excellent... vital, taut, brilliantly imaginative' Anthony Burgess

Tornado Pratt is the last of the old-style American tycoons, one who has lived his life with ferocious vigour through the vacillating fortunes of the twentieth-century USA. Paul Ableman's novel finds him in a hotel room at the end of his days, as he recounts via a dying monologue the events of his turbulent life. What is revealed, in a testimony full of jokes and surprises, is a brash, lustful, comic, profane, naive and sentimental man who, driven on by remorse, displays a wry and perceptive honesty about himself, even as his memories begin to merge with imaginings. Often funny and sometimes moving, Tornado Pratt's voice is an unforgettable one in which he confronts his own mortality, and in which Paul Ableman gives us an astonishing, affecting and life-affirming story. Auberon Waugh called Tornado Pratt 'a magnificent and memorable novel'.

Paul Ableman's modern masterpiece was first published by the Olympia Press of Paris in 1958, to instant acclaim. The narrator of I Hear Voices is a young schizophrenic who transports himself, and the reader, through a wondrously transfigured city where the real and the fantastic blend together in a seamless enchantment. The continual stream and buzz of events is often comical, occasionally wrenching, and always unpredictable. Encounters with Miss Carpet, The Commissioner, Merkitt and Mrs Oil, among others, are filled with poignant satire and disquieting honesty in this vision of the fragmentation of contemporary life. This Faber Finds edition of I Hear Voices includes a preface by Margaret Drabble: her obituary for Paul Ableman, who died in 2006. 'The book, not excluding Lolita, which gave me the greatest pride and pleasure to publish.' Maurice Girodias 'A strikingly fresh and original work of art... The writing is brilliant; both terrifying and hilariously funny.' Philip Toynbee, Observer 'Subtle, humorous, clinically authentic.' Times Literary Supplement

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.

It is time that serious notice was taken of Paul Ableman.?Anthony Burgess, author of "A Clockwork Orange"
This book is about you. How does your brain work and where do your thoughts and dreams come from? How can you harness their creative power? Ableman posits a crucial relationship between language and memory and thus between language and self-awareness. Most startlingly he maintains that the human 'person' is essentially the language component of a large-brained animal. Ableman has researched his theory using existing data derived from the malfunctioning mind as manifested in schizophrenia, sleepwalking, autism, 'out of body' experiences and nightmares. His revolutionary claims constitute an exciting and persuasive theory of mind which orthodox science could - and should - test.
Paul Ableman is the author of many novels, including "I Hear Voices, VacTornado Pratt" and science fiction?"Twilight of the Vilp"?as well as over twenty stage and broadcast television scripts.
'The novel reads so accurately and is precisely attuned to the details of madness that it leads us to suspect that something must be at least slightly askew with its creator. This, by the way, is a compliment."?"Woodstock Times"
Paul Ableman's "I Hear Voices" and "Tornado Pratt" have just been reissued by McPherson & Company.
Combines the accessibility of Steven Pinker's "How The Mind Works" with the startling originality of Sherwin Nuland's "Wisdom of the Body."

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.