Barry Malzberg lives with his wife and daughter in Manhattan and is worried about having recently reached the ominous age of eighty….
Mr. Malzberg’s first hardcover novels, Oracle of the Thousand Hands and Screen are seriously-intentioned works which, according to the author, were neither fun to write nor fun in retrospect. Major influences on his work in no particular order are Norman Mailer, J.D. Salinger, Saul Bellow, James Agee, Vladimir Nabokov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Nikolai Gogol.
Not quite. The major major influences upon the author’s "seriously-intentioned” hardcover novels, as well as eight paperbacks done for the Olympia Press America between 1968 and 1973 were really: Jayne Mansfield, Natalie Wood, Hope Lange, repentance, desire, lust, resentment, ambition and the collected opi of the Four Coins, Four Preps, Four Seasons and the Belmonts. (Dion, too.) Heady stuff for the kid, though, writing for Nabokov’s publisher, citing Gogol and Dostoyevsky as influences; I recommend this experience to everyone having real or even slight pretensions to artistry.--The New Olympia Reader