NP? book about _Candy_

[pynchonoid]

from PW Daily for Booksellers, 20 April 2004

[...] The Candy Men: The Rollicking Life and Times of
the Notorious Novel
Candy by Nile Southern. Arcade, $27.95 (408p) ISBN
155970604X
In the spirit of VH1's Behind the Music comes this
revealing
behind-the-scenes look at the making, breaking,
remaking, pirating,
filming and legal wrangling of the '60s cult
phenomenon Candy. An
erotic satire vaguely inspired by Voltaire's Candide
and penned under
the name Maxwell Kenton (the nom de plume of its
ex-pat coauthors,
Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg), Candy was first
published in
1958 by the notorious French publisher, Maurice
Giordias. The book was
immediately banned, then reissued under the title
Lollipop, barred
again, then reissued again, sanitized in England and
eventually
shipped stateside, where thanks to Putnam and a slew
of publishing
pirates, it leapt to bestsellerdom and was eventually
crowned "the
world's most talked about book." Southern's own son,
Nile, has
recounted the novel's bumpy and adventurous journey in
a magnificent
epistolary style, reprinting the correspondence
between Candy's
authors, its publisher and its increasingly
complicated web of
involved parties. The compilation perfectly captures
the "growing
misunderstandings, temper tantrums, paranoid
fixations, jealousies,
dreams and utter despair that each of these men went
through as they
tried to regain control over their book lost in a
miasma of cloudy
copyright." (Miasma is an apt term: by the second half
of the book the
legal fog is so thick that it's nearly impossible to
keep track of
who's suing whom.) Raucous and voyeuristic, this
biography of a book
offers valuable insight into the Beat scenes of Paris
and New York, as
well as into the publishing world during an era of
shifting attitudes
toward censorship. Perhaps most importantly, it also
offers a window
onto the lives and minds of two wildly creative
literary characters:
the authors Southern and Hoffenberg themselves. [...]



	
		
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