The Broken House
Tom La Farge
book one of The Enchantments
ISBN 978-1-941550-25-0 $18.00 374 pages
On Terror of Earth
Retooling fables is work that has interested plenty of writers before La Farge.… It is getting to the point though that even the hopeful reader worries the latest retelling will fall for the traps. La Farge does not. His fables do not update. His fables do not set out to reveal the psycho-sexual underpinnings of seeming innocent tales. His fables do not attempt to make relentless and annoying comparisons to the way we live today. A good retelling does not just tinker.… Rather, a good retelling reinvents. A good retelling makes monsters from scratch. La Farge is an inventor of fine monsters.
Paul Maliszewski, Rain Taxi
On The Crimson Bears
The Crimson Bears is the real thing. When this book … is reprinted in seventy years, it will be the source of a new Nile. So I urge the sensitive reader to drink now from this pure spring rather than swill the ten-thousand-times diluted mud that will follow. The Crimson Bears is a book of revelation.… This language is pure magic—it makes one aware of the essential parts of oneself.
Don Webb, American Book Review
The Moroccan landscape, physical and cultural, impressed itself so strongly on Tom's imagination that it has remained his principal “world” in recent compositions, the libretto Talking While Shaving, and the novel, The Broken House as well as a memoir, Chameleomancy. Tom La Farge is the author of Zuntig (Green Integer) and other novels and runs the Writhing Society, along with Wendy Walker, at Proteus Gowanus Gallery in Brooklyn, NY. His website is: tomlafarge.com.