Further Adventures
By Jon Stephen Fink
(Harper Perennial, Paperback, 9780061715433, 368pp.)
Publication Date: October 2009
Other Editions of This Title: Google eBook
Categories: General
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To Whom It May Concern—I was The Green Ray. Now it can be told—the story which many tried to silence, many refused to believe, and many did not want to hear.
In the depths of the Great Depression, the voice of a radio superhero known as The Green Ray entertained America. Forty years later, the man behind the character—two-bit voice actor Ray Green, known to his family as Reuven Agranovsky—is caught in an all-night blackout in the desert town of Mason, New Mexico, where a chain of events is set in motion that forces The Green Ray out of retirement. But at seventy-three, Ray faces a different—and far more terrifying—world.
A wildly inventive, raucously funny novel of heroism, neurosis, and transcendence, Further Adventures was ahead of its time when it was first published fifteen years ago. Like Ray Green himself, it now reemerges in a newly revised "author's cut" for a new generation of readers.
Jon Stephen Fink is the author of the novel Further Adventures, which has just been re-issued by Harper Perennial in an edition newly revised by the author. His poetry has been published in the Chicago Review and The New York Quarterly, among other magazines. Born in Philadelphia and raised in Los Angeles, he now lives in Great Britain, where he is working on his sixth novel, The Return of The Green Ray.
“A stylistic tour de force....engagingly comic, hypnotically seductive...an authentically psychotic monologue [blending] the bombastic strains of superhero fantasia and a familiar streak of ironic Jewish pragmatism....charismatic.”
-Madison Smartt Bell, New York Times
“Extraordinary. . . . The novel that’s surprised and impressed me most this year.”
-Douglas Adams, “Books of the Year,” The Guardian (UK)
“Dazzling. . . . never loses [its] light touch. . . . Fink not only faithfully recreates the old world of radio serials, but also brings his naïve main character into the morally ambiguous 1980s and gives him a sad, stubborn dignity.”
-Chris Petrakos, Chicago Tribune
“Adventures uses Green’s semi-literate style to beautiful effect. . . . Further Adventures is creative, wrenching, even funny—an intelligent look at pop morality taken to its logical extreme.”
-James Poniewozic, New York Perspectives
“Impressive. . . . Fink has a fine ear for dialogue [and] Ray Green is a truly original creation.”
-Time Out London
“A freewheeling, high-energy tour de force. . . . Breathtaking in its juxtaposition of wisecracks and tragedy, with a veritable Don Quixote running loose in the American Southwest: a distinctive debut.”
-Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Marvelous. …[its] two plots, past and present, trot in and out of the ring like trick ponies, carrying an impossibly colorful but appealing cast of characters.…The plot is as absurd as it is intricate…it’s fun and sad at the same time.
-Terry Bisson, Washington Post
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