books by Stuart Gelzer
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NOVELS
CLUB BALAFON
a novel by Stuart Gelzer
278 pages
5¼ x 8 inches
paperback $20.00 + shipping (US only)
ebook $11.99
It’s urban Africa: a world of French cars, Lebanese hardware stores, and American movies, not jungle and savannah—and of working-class Africans, not rich white men on safari.
It’s an off-beat, violent, darkly comic window onto post-colonial Africa and the children of expatriates on a single day in a West African city in the 1970s.
Under its Elmore Leonard caper-gone-wrong thriller surface it’s an examination, closer to V. S. Naipaul or Athol Fugard, of the changing and unchanging tragicomic rules of life for both Black men and White adolescents in newly independent but recently colonial Africa.
It’s an abandoned nightclub at the top of an isolated hill overlooking the city: the CLUB BALAFON.
Available in print format directly from
Bertie Stanhope Press.
Also available, in both print and ebook formats,
from Barnes & Noble, IndieBound, Kobo, Amazon,
and other booksellers.
EARTHWORM
a novel by Stuart Gelzer
360 pages
5¼ x 8 inches
paperback $20.00 + shipping (US only)
ebook $11.99
On the surface EARTHWORM is a comedic social satire of life in an absurd and economically collapsed post-Soviet dictatorship: 40-foot bronze statues of the President that gesticulate and recite his poetry, an isolated and mysterious Seismic Institute in the restricted zone out in the desert, public doll burnings, a no-budget exploitation movie about medieval knights and modern gangsters, a government campaign to suppress foreign music, rumors of ethnic cleansing and secret weapons research and teleportation, and possibly further sinister forays into science fiction....
It’s also a spy story about failed spies, a love story about people who never stop arguing, and a buddy comedy about a sad-sack loser and a shameless con artist, both doing their not-very-good best to get by in the free-for-all of post-Soviet life.
Available in print format directly from
Bertie Stanhope Press.
Also available, in both print and ebook formats,
from Barnes & Noble, IndieBound, Kobo, Amazon,
and other booksellers.
TENNYSON TYMPANY
a novel by Stuart Gelzer
228 pages
5¼ x 8 inches
paperback $20.00 + shipping (US only)
ebook $11.99
If Preston Sturges and Anthony Trollope had collaborated on a breezy how-to manual for pickpocketing, forgery, house burglary, counterfeiting, and murdering a few of your closest relatives, it might have turned out a little like this light-fingered caper about all those things and more.
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TENNYSON TYMPANY starts with death by falling brontosaurus and a fortune built on toothpaste-filled golf balls, and vaults from there to ever greater nonsense—taking for granted that, left to their own devices, unprotected young readers will naturally thrill to screwball mayhem and ten-dollar words and the triumph of the moderately wicked over the insufferably good.
Available in print format directly from
Bertie Stanhope Press.
Also available, in both print and ebook formats,
from Barnes & Noble and other booksellers.
MEMOIR
SIX REASONS TO TRAVEL
An American Singer in Georgia
by Stuart Gelzer
314 pages
b&w photographs
5¼ x 8 inches
paperback $20.00 + shipping (US only)
ebook $11.99
Stuart Gelzer first visited Georgia in the Cold War 1970s and has been back repeatedly over a span of more than thirty-five years. Much of SIX REASONS covers the period when he was living and studying language and music intensively in Georgia in the 1990s, the critical decade in which Georgians saw their lives uprooted as they staggered into the post-Soviet world.
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Gelzer was far from an anonymous reporter gliding unobserved through modern Georgian life. As a member of Trio Kavkasia—quasi-celebrities in a country that takes its traditional music very seriously—he played a part in the early popularization of Georgian folk music abroad. Rather than a work of reportage, therefore, SIX REASONS TO TRAVEL is the highly subjective, often irreverent, unexpectedly comical account of what happened to him along the way.
Also available, in both print and ebook formats,
from Barnes & Noble, IndieBound, Kobo, Amazon,
and other booksellers.
PHOTO BOOK
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HOODOO BADLANDS
New Mexico's Chaco Wash Landscape: the Bisti and Beyond
by Stuart Gelzer
132 pages, full color
8 x 12 inches
paperback $39.95 + shipping (US only)
HOODOO BADLANDS contains almost 140 of Stuart Gelzer's full-color photographs from six years of exploration in the badlands of northwestern New Mexico: the Bisti, the De-Na-Zin, Lybrook (including the Black Place), and Ah-shi-sle-pah.
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Each section of the book is devoted to a single badlands area, and opens with a short essay. The tone is informal and personal, focusing on what distinguishes one place from another, and especially on the author's own experiences of camping and photographing in that particular place.
THE DEVIL'S MEMOIRS
by Frédéric Soulié
translated by Stuart Gelzer
Volume 1
420 pages
6 x 9 inches
paperback $24.95
Volume 2
422 pages
6 x 9 inches
paperback $24.95
THE DEVIL’S MEMOIRS uses a loose supernatural frame of the hero’s ten-year contract with Satan as a device to present an encyclopedic view of French society in the 1820s and 30s, the period following the upheavals of Revolution and Terror and Napoleonic Empire and Bourbon Restoration, all the way through the July Revolution of 1830. Frédéric Soulié’s 1838 masterpiece —never before translated into English—is often pigeonholed as a Gothic novel of demonic possession, but it’s really a national novel of manners, working the same ground as Stendhal and Balzac, and arguably livelier, more surprising, and more modern than either of them.
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The novel (presented in this edition in two volumes) takes the form of several dozen not quite self-contained tales, some involving the flawed hero Baron de Luizzi directly but many consisting of nested stories he is told, by the Devil or by someone else. The whole series of long short stories or novellas is held together loosely by the running buddy comedy of Luizzi and Satan, whom Luizzi summons to explain the inner workings of the world to him. That structure allows Soulié to shift his setting and tone for rapid contrast: high drama, melodrama, tragedy, thriller, and farce repeatedly take their turns in the foreground, often from one page to the next.
forthcoming Jan/Feb 2025 from Black Coat Press
THE HUNCHBACK
by Paul Féval
translated by Stuart Gelzer
484 pages
6 x 9 inches
paperback $36.95
ebook $9.99
“Whoever you are, your hand will carry my mark. And when it’s time, if you won’t come to Lagardère, Lagardère will come to you!” A classic tale of hidden identity and swashbuckling vengeance stretching across decades, THE HUNCHBACK has thrilled readers since it first came out in 1857.
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Paul Féval’s “cape and sword” landmark is as beloved in France as Dumas’s Three Musketeers (there have been half a dozen movie adaptations) but this modern translation is the first and only complete rendering of THE HUNCHBACK in English.
available from Black Coat Press
HARRY DICKSON vs. MYSTERAS
by Jean Ray
translated by Stuart Gelzer
244 pages
5 x 8 inches
paperback $20.95
When inhuman monsters walk the Earth, Justice has no stronger defenders than Harry Dickson and his assistant Tom Wills, who fight the forces of evil and cast them back into the Darkness from whence they came.
This volume of the long-running 1930s francophone Sherlock Holmes pastiche, translated for the first time, includes four original episodes: Mysteras, The Tribunal of Terror, The Path of the Gods, and The Devil’s Bed.
available from Black Coat Press
KRIK-KROK, THE WALKING DEAD
by Jean Ray
translated by Stuart Gelzer
254 pages
5 x 8 inches
paperback $20.95
When inhuman monsters walk the Earth, Justice has no stronger defenders than Harry Dickson and his assistant Tom Wills, who fight the forces of evil and cast them back into the Darkness from whence they came.
This volume of the long-running 1930s francophone Sherlock Holmes pastiche includes seven original episodes: Krik-Krok, The King of Midnight, The House of Great Peril, The Seven-Pointed Star, and more, all translated for the first time.
available from Black Coat Press
MISS MUSKETEER
by Paul d'Ivoi
translated by Stuart Gelzer
320 pages
6 x 9 inches
paperback $24.95
All seemed lost! But suddenly an azure fire was kindled on the ramparts of the Chinese citadel… And then the besiegers abruptly dispersed, melting away into the night, scorning a victory that their adversaries considered inevitable.
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The novels in d’Ivoi's early 1900s series of Eccentric Voyages feature Vernean airships with mobile wings, amphibious mobile fortresses, a super-submarine, various types of death rays, futuristic weapons and other mechanical sci-fi devices.
available from Black Coat Press
QUEEN OF ILLUSIONS
by Paul d'Ivoi
translated by Stuart Gelzer
320 pages
6 x 9 inches
paperback $24.95
A luxurious liner, the Cyclopic, transformed into a necropolis by freezing clouds projected from a futuristic aircraft, wanders the ocean like a ghost ship... Thanks to that monstrous crime, Tom Slane hopes to become master of the Syndicate of Billionaires. But Miss May, a brilliant young engineer, vows to stop him.
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In the unequal struggle between the ruthless businessman and the young scientist, Slane deploys the Vulture, a fantastical flying machine built in his factories… But he doesn’t know that May, too, has an extraordinary weapon: electronically amplified mesmeric mind control!