American Goliath
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- $3.99
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- $3.99
Publisher Description
The story of America's greatest hoax, "the Cardiff Giant"—shows up even the legendary. P.T.Barnum! All with a fantastical twist from award-winning author Harvey Jacobs.
PRAISE FOR AMERICAN GOLIATH
An inspired novel.
—TIME Magazine
A masterpiece...arguably this year's best novel.
—Kirkus Reviews.
Bells clanging, lights aflash, the plot's ball bangs and rebounds. . . . A wonderful and wonderfully funny book.
—James Sallis
LA Times
His characters are haunting. . . . I have rarely enjoyed finding a writer as much as I have enjoyed my own discovery of Jacobs.
—Robert Cromie
Chicago Tribune
He manages to satirize our all-too-human foibles and failures without becoming too blackly unforgiving.
—Thomas M. Disch
Washington Post
Quietly amused, wry approach that gives distinction to Mr. Jacobs' work . . . his dry humor would be hard to improve on.
—Elizabeth Easton
The Saturday Review
A wonderfully engrossing read. . . . I recommend it to everyone who has given up of ever again being entertained at such a high level of aspiration.
—Michael Moorcock
A bawdy, joyous romp . . . it's a wonderful book.
—Jack Dann
Look upon the amazing world of Harvey Jacobs! Come one, come all, for an experience never to be forgotten!
—Fred Chappell
Like Doctorow's Ragtime and George R. R. Martin's Fevre Dream, it's totally realized.
—Howard Waldrop
A great book should aspire (and succeed) in making you laugh, making you cry and just maybe, making you think. . . . Harvey's novels will do all that.
—John Pelan
About Harvey Jacobs
Harvey Jacobs is the award-winning author of "American Goliath" ("An inspired novel"—TIME Magazine). His short fiction has appeared in a wide spectrum of magazines in the USA and abroad including Esquire, The Paris Review, Playboy, Fantasy & Science Fiction, New Worlds, and many anthologies. In addition to the novels and short stories, he has written widely for television, the Earplay Project for radio drama, and helped create and name the Obie Awards for the Village Voice. He was publisher of the counterculture newspaper, East. He received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a New York Arts Council CAPS award for drama, a Playboy Fiction Award, and a Writers Guild of America script award.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Based on a true story of American fraud and gullibility, this delightfully ribald and tongue-in-cheek account "Inspired by the True, Incredible Events Surrounding the Mysterious Marvel Known to the Astonished World as the Cardiff Giant" breathes life and magic into the P.T. Barnum era and a legendary hoax. In 1868, prodigal George Hull is exiled to his sister's home in Iowa after his father (patriarch of a family of Binghamton, N.Y., cigar makers) discovers him in bed with his sexy sister-in-law. In Iowa, George hears a wild-eyed preacher, claiming that Genesis actually took place in America, declare: "There were Giants in the earth in those days." When archeologists start digging up human fossils in rural New York near George's hapless cousin Stubby Newell's farm in Cardiff, George procures a massive slab of Iowa stone and hires a pair of hard-bitten tombstone sculptors to make the evidence that will confirm the preacher's claim. With the unwitting help of an itinerant Jewish dowser, well-diggers exhume the colossus and turn it into an overnight sensation. This arouses the competitive juices of P.T. Barnum and his sidekick, General Tom Thumb: suddenly the Giant has a twin. Embroidered with cameos of Boss Tweed, Edwin Booth, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt and others, this quaint tapestry is further enlivened with enough lewd misbehavior to put a smile on even the stoniest face. FYI: The Cardiff Giant is on permanent display at the Farmer's Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y.
