Penguin Modern Classics

The Medusa Frequency

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'Sparkles with classical allusions and a wisecracking humour ... it is pure joy' Daily Telegraph 
 
It all begins the night a leaflet comes through the door of unsuccessful novelist Herman Orff, promising a magical cure for writer's block. The strange treatment plunges him into a hallucinatory London dreamworld populated by figures mythical and real: a severed talking head, Vermeer's girl with a pearl earring, his lost love Luise and, beneath it all, the Kraken awaiting. As Herman will discover, creating art is a tough business. 
 
'One of his most accessibly entertaining books' The Times 
 
'Short, smart and fizzy, the novel seeks out the roots of creativity with none of the solemnity that phrase implies' New Statesman

Short, smart and fizzy, the novel seeks out the roots of creativity with none of the solemnity that phrase implies.

Worth rejoicing in ... a banquet of whimsical delights. Each Russell Hoban book is surprising ... but you also know what you're getting, which is curiosity, wonder and a world-encompassing empathy.

On his death in 2011, The Times described Russell Hoban as 'perhaps the most consistently strange writer of the late 20th century'. He thought and wrote in an extraordinary range of genres, becoming first a bestselling writer of children's books, particularly the immortal Frances stories and his first novel, The Mouse and His Child (1968). After its publication he continued to write for children (most notably perhaps the Captain Najork books with Quentin Blake and The Marzipan Pig), but focussed most of his energies on a sequence of wonderful novels, which began with The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz (1973) and ended with Angelica Lost and Found (2010). He also wrote the libretto for Harrison Birtwistle's opera The Second Mrs Kong (1994). 
 
His novels were wildly various, but share his obsession with objects, animals, specific works of art and pieces of music, his love of words and sense of humour. Penguin Modern Classics publishes his first eight novels: The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz, Kleinzeit, Turtle Diary, Riddley Walker, Pilgermann, The Medusa Frequency, Fremder and Mr Rinyo-Clacton's Offer.

An inexplicable message flashing onto the screen of his Apple II computer at 3 a.m. heralds the beginning of a startling quest for frustrated author Herman Orff. Taking up the offer of a cure for writer's block leads him to 'those places in your head that you can't get to on your own'. Herman is plunged into a semi-dreamland inhabited by a bizarre combination of characters from myth and reality: the talking head of Orpheus; a lost love; the young girl of Vermeer's famous portrait - and a frequency of Medusas.

Mr Rinyo-Clacton's Offer

'Russell Hoban's imagination knows no bounds ... darkly funny and profound' The Times 
 
'You want to buy my death for a million pounds!' Piccadilly Circus tube station is an unlikely location for a pact with the Devil, but this is where Jonathan Fitch first meets Mr Rinyo-Clacton. Devastated after his girlfriend Serafina has left him, Jonathan agrees that this mysterious stranger will pay him a million pounds for a year, if he agrees to die at the end of it. What could possibly go wrong? 
 
'A poignant and engaging fable of ownership and surrender' Philip Hensher, Mail on Sunday 
 
'Nothing is accidental or optional in this jewelled clockwork egg of a book ... Hoban is a hugely skilled, moving and endlessly entertaining writer' The Times Literary Supplement

Nothing is accidental or optional in this jewelled clockwork egg of a book... Hoban is a hugely skilled, moving and endlessly entertaining writer.

A poignant and engaging fable of ownership and surrender.

He mixes wild invention with subtle observation... the resulting tale reads like a downbeat, offbeat Faust for the tawdry, lottery-playing 1990s.

Serial philanderer Jonathan Fitch is distraught when his girlfriend Serafina leaves him. In a desperate state at Piccadilly Circus underground station, he meets wealthy, mysterious Mr Rinyo-Clacton, and ends up agreeing to a Faustian pact: Mr Rinyo-Clacton will give Jonathan one million pounds, if he agrees to die in a year's time. Can Jonathan go on living like this? Can he go on living at all? A wry, affectionate look at what goes on between consenting, relenting and dissenting adults.

Riddley Walker

'This is what literature is meant to be' Anthony Burgess 
 
'O what we ben! And what we come to...' Wandering a desolate post-apocalyptic landscape, speaking a broken-down English lost after the end of civilization, Riddley Walker sets out to find out what brought humanity here. This is his story. 
 
'Funny, terrible, haunting and unsettling, this book is a masterpiece' Observer 
 
'A timeless portrayal of the human condition ... frightening and uncanny' Will Self 
 
'A book that I could read every day forever and still be finding things' Max Porter

Russell Hoban has brought off an extraordinary feat of imagination and of style ... funny, terrible, haunting and unsettling, this book is a masterpiece.

You are syntactically and emotionally and politically absolutely in the book's spell. The way it changes is unbelievable; it is a living thing.

Extraordinary... a hero with Huck Finn's heart, lighting by El Greco and jokes by Punch and Judy... Fiercely imagined and intensely ponderable.

Suffused with melancholy and wonder, beautifully written, Riddley Walker is a novel people will be reading for a long, long time.

The strongest, most desolate and bewildered voice in modern fiction.  In the mental silence that followed the closing of the last page, I wanted to applaud, through tears.

The book has an evangelical effect on people ... Riddley is an absorbing character, Hoban's language has a fantastic, rough poetry and the post-apocalyptic world is chilling and convincing.

'O what we ben! And what we come to...' Wandering a desolate post-apocalyptic landscape, speaking a broken-down English lost after the end of civilization, Riddley Walker sets out to find out what brought humanity here. This is his story.

Kleinzeit

'An original ... a delight to read' The Times 
 
On an ordinary day in a strangely unfamiliar London, Kleinzeit is fired from his advertising job and told he must go to hospital with a skewed hypotenuse. There on Ward A4, he falls in love with the divine, rosy-cheeked Sister and is sent spinning into a quest involving, among other things, a glockenspiel, sheets of yellow paper, Orpheus, the Underground and that dirty chimpanzee, Death. 
 
'Kleinzeit, is a sort of holy fool, a fierce, lonely intelligence desperately trying to make sense of a hopeless world. A tour de force ... entirely delightful' Auberon Waugh, Evening Standard

A very funny quest for creativity and sanity ... There are no boring sentences in a Hoban novel.

Russell Hoban is one of our greatest, timeless novelists.

Masterly ... a mosaic in which each tiny fragment of wit or dirt or profundity has its appointed place.

A second tour-de-force... entirely delightful.

Brimming with humanity and humour... brilliant handling of language.

Russell Hoban is our Ur-novelist, a maverick voice that is like no other.

On an ordinary day in a strangely unfamiliar London, Kleinzeit is fired from his advertising job and told he must go to hospital with a skewed hypotenuse. There on Ward A4, he falls in love with the divine, rosy-cheeked Sister and is sent spinning into a quest involving, among other things, a glockenspiel, sheets of yellow paper, Orpheus, the Underground and that dirty chimpanzee, Death.

The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz

'A piece of invention as original as any of Tolkien's or C.S. Lewis's' New Statesman 
 
'I have gone to look for a lion.' In a world where lions have become extinct, the map-maker Jachin-Boaz nevertheless abandons his wife and son to find one, leaving just this note. But his decision has unexpected consequences. He will be pursued by his son, Boaz-Jachin, and by something else: a tawny-skinned, amber-eyed beast from another place and time, a bringer of life and death. 
 
'Magic at work ... Funny as well as beautiful' Irish Times 
 
'Hoban is unclassifiable, thank goodness. His narrative is so minutely and compellingly realistic that after a time you cease to notice that he has stood reality on its head' Sunday Times

Magic at work ... Funny as well as beautiful.

Amazingly, the mythology is sustained in totally modern terms, desolate, comic and urban.

A piece of invention as original as any of Tolkien's or C.S. Lewis's.

Mr. Hoban is unclassifiable, thank goodness. His narrative is so minutely and compellingly realistic that after a time you cease to notice that he has stood reality on its head.

'I have gone to look for a lion.' In a world where lions have become extinct, the map-maker Jachin-Boaz nevertheless abandons his wife and son to find one, leaving just this note. But his decision has unexpected consequences. He will be pursued by his son, Boaz-Jachin, and by something else: a tawny-skinned, amber-eyed beast from another place and time, a bringer of life and death.

Pilgermann

'Superb ... Pilgermann is history, metaphysics, a tangle of mysteries, profound and simple' Guardian 
 
It is 1097 and a traveller arrives in the great, walled city of Antioch with a vision of a beautiful and mysterious geometric design that will change the lives of all those who see it. Pilgermann is a mesmerising recreation of the world of the Crusades, following its unlikely hero and those he meets on a journey of picaresque horror across a Europe of hatreds, visions and a desperate wish for salvation. 
 
'A dark treatise on the mysterious nature of things ... The world according to Pilgermann is a brutish place borrowing from Hieronymus Bosch, pilgrimage narrative, allegory and the historical novel' The New York Times Book Review 
 
'A strange and beautiful work' Evening Standard

Superb ... Pilgermann is history, metaphysics, a tangle of mysteries, profound and simple.

The world according to Pilgermann is a brutish place borrowing from Hieronymus Bosch's grotesque depictions of hell and the literary traditions of pilgrimage narrative, allegory and the historical novel. It is a novel of ideas... sophisticated and demanding.

A strange and beautiful work, whose mysteries are worth contemplation. Hoban's prose is constantly persuasive. Pilgermann is that rare thing - a novel that can be read with profit more than once.

It is 1097 and a traveller arrives in the great, walled city of Antioch with a vision of a beautiful and mysterious geometric design that will change the lives of all those who see it. Pilgermann is a mesmerising recreation of the world of the Crusades, following its unlikely hero and those he meets on a journey of picaresque horror across a Europe of hatreds, visions and a desperate wish for salvation.

Turtle Diary

'Wonderful, life-saving ... places Russell Hoban among the greatest, timeless novelists' The Times 
 
Born to swim thousands of miles in the ocean, the giant sea turtles are now trapped in a tank of golden-green water at London Zoo. But not for much longer. Two lonely people, a bookseller and a children's illustrator, have begun thinking turtle thoughts. As they come together to hatch a plan to release the turtles into the sea, their diaries reveal how they find their own lives changing in imperceptible and quite unintended ways. 
 
'Crackles with witty detail, mordant intelligence and self-deprecating irony' Time 
 
'This lovely human fable seems to me one of the best things of its kind - a fine and touching achievement' John Fowles

This wonderful, life-saving fantasy places Russell Hoban where he has got to be - among the greatest, timeless novelists.

Crackles with witty detail, mordant intelligence and self-deprecating irony.

[Turtle Diary] has medicinal qualities. I only need to think about it and I'm in a better mood.

A story about the recovery of life ... Like other cult writers - Salinger for instance, or Vonnegut - Hoban writes about ordinary people making life-affirming gestures in a world that threatens to dissolve in madness.

This lovely human fable seems to me one of the best things of its kind - a fine and touching achievement.

Tragicomic pleasure ... Metaphysical speculation undercut by dry humour is the signature style of Russell Hoban.

Born to swim thousands of miles in the ocean, the giant sea turtles are now trapped in a tank of golden-green water at London Zoo. But not for much longer. Two lonely people, a bookseller and a children's illustrator, have begun thinking turtle thoughts. As they come together to hatch a plan to release the turtles into the sea, their diaries reveal how they find their own lives changing in imperceptible and quite unintended ways.

Russell Hoban

Recalls Orwell's 1984 and Wells's The Time Machine.... a revelation.

Unputdownable, moving, ingenious... it will remain in my head with troubling images and scenes for a long time.

Shot through with Hoban's trademark luminous prose... A book to read and reread.

He displays prodigious storytelling skills and an uncanny talent for fleshing out allegories.  The result is an urgent, bitterly ironic but tender evocation of the capacities of the human spirit.

Fourth Galaxy, 4 November 2052: in the blackness of space a figure in blue overalls tumbles over and over as it drifts towards the planet Badr-al-Budur. No space suit, no helmet, no oxygen. He can't be alive, can he? But he is. 
 
First Navigator Fremder Gorn is the only survivor when the Corporation tanker Clever Daughter disappears. Nobody knows how he did it, and everybody, including Fremder himself, wants to know. Dr Caroline Lovecraft, Head of the Physio/Psycho unit, finds that intimacy doesn't lead to answers and Fremder's own memories are resolutely obscure. Fremder's name means stranger, and his story is otherworldly and yet ultimately life-affirming.

Russell Hoban

Praise for Fremder

Recalls Orwell's 1984 and Wells's The Time Machine.... a revelation.

Unputdownable, moving, ingenious... it will remain in my head with troubling images and scenes for a long time.

Shot through with Hoban's trademark luminous prose... A book to read and reread.

Recalls Orwell's 1984 and Wells's The Time Machine.... a revelation.

Unputdownable, moving, ingenious... it will remain in my head with troubling images and scenes for a long time.

Shot through with Hoban's trademark luminous prose... A book to read and reread.

Recalls Orwell's 1984 and Wells's The Time Machine.... a revelation.

Unputdownable, moving, ingenious... it will remain in my head with troubling images and scenes for a long time.

Shot through with Hoban's trademark luminous prose... A book to read and reread.

Books by Russell Hoban

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