Opus Books: Festival of Fleas

a festival of fleas

The Tragic Life of Those
Who Live - and Love -
in a society which is not
Responsible or Accountable
Ends in Death.
But Love proves not deadly.

This is the novel
which dared to say that
Life among the Beatniks and Hippies
was not beautiful and could not end well.

It was suppressed by publishers
for 40 years.
Now OPUS BOOKS dares
to show the world!

EXCERPT
Last Preface First

   A Festival of Fleas was begun in Hollywood, California in 1958 and completed in October-November, 1962, in Heidelberg, Germany following the novel Stradella, that stellar candle of youthful ardor which was published on Bastille Day, July 14, 1962 by The Olympia Press in Paris, France and carried forth this author's name on more than a million copies in a dozen editions in several countries for the next decade, obscuring his greater work which never appeared at all.
   Festival followed, therefore, but was really the prequel to that more famous stunt, standing as the first part of The Hollywood Opera, a sextet of the sixties which remains most sacred to memory for its sally into fifties life for those young adults casting off what was then a forbidden age.
          Festival remained an orphan without a place or title till the end of the 20th Century in which it grew, like its sibling sequels, Hotstroke, Little Judy, Mighty Archy and Dancing on the Nail Pile, the comedies of charming innocence.
          While this author went on from 1970-2000 to lend a hand in more than 400 published and forgotten books and to put his wits into some 120 works of fiction yet unseen, there remains a fond memory for that utter abandon in form and content which singlized these early works of the abstract novel by a young latter-day abstractor of the essence.
   The title A Festival of Fleas was given by a friend during our mutual bereavement shared in 1978-79 when she was beginning her fine-spun froth of a memoir, Knockwood. Curtailed by my commitment to others, I no less valued serving as Robin Hood to her maid Marion which she so warmly encouraged. We were, before all, born in the same bed, after all, though nine years and nine days, with a lifetime, apart. This preface thanks Miss Candice Bergen.
            Your author is happy to have given place so long to others who came up front in our age with zeal and lost their lives to fame while he slipped out the back door to obscurity, the better to tend to living things, viewing the full carnival of human encounters anonymously in the shadow of their parade, but he now no longer cedes to any, as the body of work remaining to define this age of humility sits unseen on his shelf, ready.
            May you, Reader, enjoy The Hollywood Opera, this author's debut epic sextet, as it was freely meant.

* *