Description
What Can Be Saved from the Wreckage ?
James Branch Cabell in the Twenty-first Century
by
Michael Swanwick
With a preface by Barry Humphries
Critical monograph examining the writings of Virginia fantasist James Branch Cabell (1879-1958), author of Jurgen . Now an e-booke !
Electronic edition, published August 2016
viii+54 pp. 6 x 9 inches, pdf format; epub & mobi file formats also available
ISBN-13 : 978-0-9961359-3-1. Price $10.00
Distributed by Weightless Books and available here: https://weightlessbooks.com/what-can-be-saved-from-the-wreckage-james-branch-cabell-in-the-twenty-first-century/
It is hard to imagine today the magnitude of James Branch Cabell’s fame in the early part of the last century. Cabell’s books were Mark Twain’s chief reading in the great humorist’s declining years. Theodore Roosevelt received him at the White House. The occultist Aleister Crowley harried him with fan letters. H. L. Mencken was his advocate. Sinclair Lewis, accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930, mentioned him as one of a number of writers who might reasonably have won it.
Yet he died as good as forgotten.
What Can Be Saved from the Wreckage ? was originally published 31 October 2007 in an edition of 17 numbered copies, hand sewn and bound in a green cloth binding incorporating the original cloth covered boards of the Storisende edition, signed by Michael Swanwick and Barry Humphries, each copy with a leaf signed by James Branch Cabell. The edition was fully subscribed before publication. A trade issue, 200 copies in paper covers, distributed at World Fantasy Convention 2007, has sold out.
