Harvey Jacobs
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The latest news from August 7, 2011: Side Effects is now available as an ebook!
A large thank-you goes to Reanimus for making Side Effects available in all the various formats for all the various readers. This is what Gordon Van Gelder, editor of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction has to say about Side Effects:
Nearly 400 pages long, Side Effects has incredible humor and sharp wit (and a cover by Gahan Wilson). The novel features the uppers and downers of Simon Apple as he prepares for the ultimate pharmaceutical sacrifice.
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One day at a TV company I met a person called Harvey Jacobs, who not only happened to be a script writer for the show but also someone who I had read over the years. Harvey Jacobs!
Harvey's writing is hard to characterize except that it has a knife to it - a friendly, humorous, and humanistic knife but a knife nonetheless. In person, however, he is quite affably and knows how to tell, as well as how to write, a good story.
But there he was in the same building, on the same floor, very very close by. He began publishing fiction in the late fifties and the sixties when originality was prized, unlike the present times which are becoming more and more conservative and bleak. Anyway, his first book was a collection of short stories (The Egg of the Glak) and then came a short but funny sequence of novels, including The Juror, which is at least optioned to become a movie.
One of the happier times for me was being able to design and produce camera copy for his novel, Beautiful Soup, for Celadon Press. . . . Yes, computers have helped turned everything topsy-turvy, and you can check out the first chapter of Beautiful Soup within these pages as well as read a few excerpts of the excellent reviews the book has achieved.
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Significant Publications
- The Egg of the Glak and Other Stories, Harper & Row, 1969.
- Summer on a Mountain of Spices, Harper & Row, 1975.
- The Juror, Franklin Watts, 1980.
- Beautiful Soup, Celadon Press, 1994.
- American Goliath, St. Martins Press, 1997.
- My Rose and My Glove: Stories (Real and Surreal), Darkside Press, 2005.
- Side Effects: A Novel, Celadon Press, 2009, and an ebook via Reanimus, 2011.
My Rose and My Glove is a remarkable collection of 24 stories. A limited and numbered edition, it features a couple of new stories as well as reprints. The book is the opportunity to have on hand one of the most remarkable ranges of short stories, and I recommend it highly. Well, I wish the print were larger, but what the heck. Once absorbed in one of Harvey's stories, a reader forgets such aspects for the sheer joy of the read.