After Many A Summer
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
After Many a Summer, a magisterial new novella from Tim Powers, borrows its title from a line in Tennyson’s famous poem “Tithonus.” An elegiac appeal for death on the part of the titular figure from myth, a man who was granted the everlasting life he had originally begged from the gods, only to have their gift turn to ashes in his mouth, only, as Tennyson wrote, to become someone whom “only cruel immortality consumes.”
What does this have to do with homelessness, troubled movie production companies, kidnapped heiresses, prophecies delivered by taxidermized heads, and a Los Angeles County rendered with such masterful, lived in, bone deep attention to physical detail that to read the opening is to feel the heat from cracked asphalt rising through your shoes and to taste cheap fortified wine grown warm in the sun cloying your tongue? Can all these seemingly disparate things be connected, cohered, clarified?
This is a Tim Powers story. Of course they can.
Conrad is a down on his luck screenwriter who takes a very strange assignment that leads him to encounter a kidnapped heiress after delivering her ransom—a hundred-year-old mummified head fond of cryptic utterances. Nothing goes Conrad’s way, though, because nothing, no matter how bizarre, is what it seems.
Tim Powers is the World Fantasy and Philip K. Dick Award winning author of many novels and stories. His career spans nearly fifty years, and his imagination all of human history. This latest entry is not to be missed.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
World Fantasy Award winner Powers (Stolen Skies) is a master at turning gonzo concepts into mystical thrill rides, and this latest novella is no exception, setting a mummified head as the ransom in the kidnapping of Belgian heiress Arielle. This severed head speaks prophesies, and the kidnappers are Hollywood executives desperate to keep their sinking studio afloat by using the head's predictions to only back hits. Assisting them is Conrad, a down-and-out screenwriter promised a big payment for an old script if he can get the head; the windfall might help reunite him with his estranged family. But Conrad's scruples and a series of strange time loops get in the way, giving him a chance to rethink his decisions. Powers places his tale in a bleakly rendered Southern Californian landscape as bereft of magic as an empty film lot, with characters whose amoral focus on their bottom lines blind them to the costs and marvels of real magic. Readers who enjoyed the skewering of popular institutions in Carl Hiaasen's Florida will be equally delighted by Powers's cynical portrait of his own adopted state.