Tom Bradley

Tom Bradley has published twenty-five volumes of fiction, essays, screenplays and poetry with houses in the USA, Great Britain and Canada. Various of his novels have been nominated for the Editor’s Book Award, the New York University Bobst Prize, and the AWP Series. 3:AM Magazine in Paris gave him their Nonfiction Book of the Year Award in 2007 and 2009, and an excerpt from one of his latest books will appear in this year’s &Now Innovative Writing Award Anthology.

His journalism and criticism have appeared in such publications as Salon.com, and are featured in Arts & Letters Daily. Denis Dutton, editor of the site (“among the most influential media personalities in the world,” according to Time Magazine), wrote as follows:

Tom Bradley is one of the most exasperating, offensive, pleasurable, and brilliant writers I know. I recommend his work to anyone with spiritual fortitude and a taste for something so strange that it might well be genius.

This Wasted Land and Its Chymical Illuminations is the third book for which Tom has furnished footnotes.

OTHER BOOKS ANNOTATED BY TOM BRADLEY

Epigonesia

What Kane X. Faucher and Tom Bradley have done is like going into Top Drawer Writer’s Cemetery and having all the authors suddenly emerge from their tombs and start talking–and suddenly Bradley’s notes turn it from pure fantasy into total believability. A fascinating combo of resurrection and meditation. One of the most original/unexpected books ever written. If you want to get into the souls of these authors, this is the place to start.
–Hugh Fox, author of Shaman

A recursive, self-annotating romp through Arno Schmidt-like text commenting on text, annotating text, contradicting text. The later “Tablets” by Armand Schwerner also comes to mind. The effect is dizzying, hillarious, mystifying, Rabelasian, and is pulled off well. Faucher and Bradley are possessed of curvaceous minds which frame capacious thoughts which should be caught in mid-flight and unhusked by the prehensile wits of a wide range of readers.
–Jesse Glass, author of Lost Poet

excerpt from Epigonesia

Felicia’s Nose

A dog-whistle palimpsest, a riddling box of questions left unfinished at the author’s death, a Winchester Mystery House of a book with graffiti notes from an alternative Zoharistic universe and illustrations transcribed from the depths of Bohu-Tohu, Felicia’s Nose is an experimental novel based on the ‘call and response’ of an arcane Blues: the eternally absent author unraveling a tale from the other side of life, and the very much alive Tom Bradley answering each movement of the planchette with a drum roll cursive freighted with sentiments worthy of Sabattai Zvei.
–Jesse Glass, author of Lost Poet

…that rarity of rarities: a new genre, something like a superficially nonfictional Pale Fire, taking place in real time as the primary text alternately rides roughshod over, and is sapped and subverted by, the critical apparatus.
–Carol Novack, author of Giraffes in Hiding

excerpt from Felicia’s Nose

LATEST ILLUSTRATED BOOKS

We’ll See Who Seduces Whom: a graphic ekphrasis in verse

A complex and multi-layered dance between these two offbeat geniuses. Takes off in a high octane rampage, thunders across the defiled plains of Kansas, corners around the pope, takes multiple shots at our flabulous and star-struck culture, and brings you back for a three-martini lunch, looking brain-raped and fuddled.
–Deb Hoag, editor of Women Writing the Weird

Bradley’s unprepuced poetry entering Aronson’s debauched images make a demented and unholy intercourse. Canto after canto churns with the wordplay of the damned, with sin and sacrilege and trespass. Join these seductive souls in their satanic search for meaning when all is lost and for God when you are in hell.
–Larissa Shmailo, author of Exorcism

…a lush garden of terror teeming with vividly nightmarish imagery. Tears through sexual stereotypes with a meat hook.
–Rania Zada, author of Egyptian Exotica: A Memoir of Dancing Naked

This is Bhagavad-Gita porn.
–Jonathan Penton, publisher

Tom performs an excerpt on Vimeo

Elmer Crowley: a katabasic nekyia

Of Aleister Crowley’s many fictionalizations, this novel gets best into his head. Erudite, prideful, lascivious, funniest man of his time, and the mightiest spiritual spelunker–he speaks and shouts from these pages as clearly as he did in his Autohagiography, which is paradoxical, given the irreal setting of Elmer Crowley: a katabasic nekyia.
—Barry Katz, HTMLGIANT

illustrated excerpt from Elmer Crowley: a katabasic nekyia

another illustrated excerpt

Family Romance

…a monstrosity of the imagination, as if a Burroughs virus hijacked the machinery of Finnegans Wake and replicated itself as a literateratus.
–John-Ivan Palmer, author of Motels of Burning Madness

The fastenings and joineries of this new textual and graphic ubiety are measured in callibrations from some other dimension where the usual sockets and taper points of critical disassembly have to be replaced. Even with that, Family Romance is deviously structured to lead conclusion jumpers straight to the Hall of Laughter.
—Exquisite Corpse

illustrated excerpt from Family Romance

another illustrated excerpt

Tom performs the first chapter on Vimeo

MAJOR CRITICAL STUDIES

Tom Bradley and the Sam Edwine Pentateuch

Tom Bradley Happy-Fucks Osaka

INTERVIEWS

The Evil Glee

This Elevated Pitch

Chuffed to Be Dunked in Duchamp’s Pissoir

Bizarro is My God-Baby

Neanderthals Sprinkling Their Dead With Flowers