Archive - November 22, 2011

Concord ePress has republished John Givens (Korea 1967–69) novel,  A Friend in the Police. Originally published in 1980 by Harcourt, Brace, you can now buy the ebook version at Concord ePress: http://www.concordepress.com/a-friend-in-the-police/  Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005WOG6DE  The plot goes something like this: A middle-aged American businessman arrives in an unnamed Southeast Asian country to retrieve his wayward son. George Bates finds himself confronted by a climate and culture more bizarre than he could have anticipated, and by the mysterious Detective Sergeant Xlong, whose own background is even more tangled than the Americans and whose fecund language reflects the lush ambiguity of the tropical rain forest. Bates is soon lost in a complex, hallucinatory world that resembles a rewrite of The Heart of Darkness by Franz Kafka. A Friend in the Police is often spoken of by veteran authors as the book they wish they had written. Newly revised by the author, this . . .