New in our Moloko+ catalogue:
William Levy – The Fortunate Traveller
In 1594 Elizabethan satirist Thomas Nashe published ‘The Unfortunate Traveller’. This picaresque novel, the first of its kind in Britain, was set on the continent and followed its protagonist’s adventures through a string of European towns. In graphic descriptions Jack Wilton, a court page, testified to the “wonderful spectacle of bloodshed” that 16th-century Europe had become and doing so allowed Thomas Nashe to expose the religious and political hypocrisy of his days. William Levy, who has been familiar with the works of Nashe since the 1960s, has now coined a collection of his erotic stories ‘The Fortunate Traveller’. In that way Levy’s tales, published on various occasions over the years and now compiled by Moloko Plus, form a loose but in content and style coherent series of picaresque adventures with the author himself as a horny protagonist. While picaresque novels traditionally use frog’s perspectives, low viewpoints from the fringe, to present readers with distorted and hilarious images of the higher layers of society, Levy’s perspective is rather outside-in. Levy offers the reader glimpses of bedrooms that he shared with attractive women in Amsterdam, Paris, Prague, Ohio, Baltimore and Vilnius, at the same time satirizing the incrowd, the “haute riff-rafferie of the demimonde“, among whom several figures of the counterculture. “History without gossip is a dry biscuit”, Levy once explained. And that is very true: his latest erotic picaresque novel is not only to a large extent autobiographical but sheer voyeur’s and eavesdropper’s delight to boot. More →