Gloucesterbook

Parenting & Relationships

Jonathan Bayliss

Family Relationships

Protean Press

Gloucesterbook is groundbreaking American fiction of the 20th century - one of four novels that make up the unconventional and stimulating literary masterpiece GLOUCESTERMAN. In Gloucesterbook, the central character Caleb Karcist, absorbed in his consulting work, creative ideas, and love life, becomes intrigued by the politics, arts, and eccentric society of a fishing port (modeled on Gloucester, Massachusetts) called "Dogtown" on the Atlantic Coast's "Cape Gloucester" during the 1960s. The novel describes a unique geography that draws to it people with unusual experiences and interests, including businessman Rafe Opsimath, avant-garde poet Ipsissimus Charlemagne, and Fathers Lucey and Duncannon of a tiny High Church religious order. Through the web of Caleb's work life and friendships, this fiction - with its extraordinarily detailed observations, exuberant language, and quiet humor - weaves together ideas and feelings about business, history, politics, systems, ritual, and sex. This is a novel about mid-20th-century America as experienced in an exceptionally interesting Atlantic seaport where work, love, and creative mind come together.

Literature & Fiction

Literary

Protean

Jonathan Bayliss's groundbreaking fiction - the tetralogy GLOUCESTERMAN - has been compared to the works of Sterne, Melville, Joyce, Broch, and Musil. Like the other GLOUCESTERMAN novels, Gloucestertide is inventive, good-humored, and thought-provoking. It explores Bayliss's wide-ranging interests including theater, systems, engineering, financial webs, liturgy, railroads, geography, and politics - as well as the challenges of friendship, love, sex, art, and work. The setting is "Dogtown" on "Cape Gloucester" in the 1960s. Bayliss's play The Tower of Gilgamesh (or The Iso-Recto-Tetrahedron) is woven into the Gloucestertide narrative. The tetralogy is headed by Prologos (1999) and includes the trilogy Gloucesterbook (1992), Gloucestertide (1996), and Gloucestermas (2010). The novels may be read in any order.

Gloucestertide (Gloucesterman series)

Drawbridge Press

Prologos is Jonathan Bayliss's sparkling, complex, experimental, playful, serious, richly detailed literary masterpiece of the 20th century whose protagonist, Michael Chapman, is the "author" or "controller" of the other three novels in Bayliss's GLOUCESTERMAN tetralogy. The foreground is California's Bay Area about a decade after the end of World War 2. The background is the pre-war East Coast (Cambridge, Gloucester, Manhattan) and the wartime and post-war Pacific of Chapman's Naval service. Living in Oakland with wife and children, he yearns for the Gloucester that he left as a child, and for the European world he's never seen. He is torn three ways by domestic love, by the practical matters of his livelihood, and by the conflicts of intellectual life. No one reader will sympathize with all the manias or crochets either of Chapman or of his friend Caleb Karcist. But a thoughtful reading will engage almost anyone's mind with the novel's intellectual departures from traditional narrative. Prologos generates anthropological, economic, technical, and literary ideas from a base of erotic and social realism. This novel is a diamond mine for digging, a sandy stream for panning gold.

Prologos (Gloucesterman series)

Gloucestermas is the culmination of Jonathan Bayliss's masterwork, GLOUCESTERMAN, a tetralogy reviewers have compared to the fiction of Sterne, Melville, Joyce, Broch, and Musil. Like Gloucesterbook and Gloucestertide, this richly detailed, playful, and expansive novel is centered on the Atlantic Coast's seaport "Dogtown" on "Cape Gloucester." Rafe Opsimath and Caleb Karcist are now older, with new practical, social, and intellectual preoccupations in 1980s Dogtown. Woven into the narrative are the Cape Gloucester and Isle of Man of the 1920s, Dogtown legends and municipal affairs, the fate of the schooner Gloucesterman, the play The Tower of Gilgamesh, and a Court of Love. Expanding the network of friends, spouses, and lovers, new central characters are intertwined in the sprawling web of ideas, history, geography, responsibility, experience, conversation, and love that make GLOUCESTERMAN unique in the world of literature. Gloucestermas may be enjoyed independently or alongside the previous novels in the GLOUCESTERMAN series, headed by Prologos and including Gloucesterbook and Gloucestertide.

Gloucestermas (Gloucesterman)

Gilgamesh Plays

These dramatic works, The Tower of Gilgamesh and The Acts of Gilgamesh, take place in Sumer (now southern Iraq), where it is said that civilization began: the first writing, numbering, and accounting systems, the first literature, and, for better or worse, the Tower of Babel. Loosely based on the Gilgamesh legend, together the plays form a comedic tragedy exploring - with humor, imagination, and spirited language - ideas about free will, love, creativity, friendship, and religion.

Dramas & Plays

These dramatic works, The Tower of Gilgamesh and The Acts of Gilgamesh, take place in Sumer (now southern Iraq), where it is said that civilization began: the first writing, numbering, and accounting systems, the first literature, and, for better or worse, the Tower of Babel. Loosely based on the Gilgamesh legend, together the plays form a comedic tragedy exploring - with humor, imagination, and spirited language - ideas about free will, love, creativity, friendship, and religion.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Jonathan Bayliss. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Jonathan Bayliss

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Jonathan Bayliss. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Gloucesterbook

Gloucesterbook

Gloucestertide (Gloucesterman series)

Prologos (Gloucesterman series)

Gloucestermas (Gloucesterman)

Gilgamesh Plays

Gilgamesh Plays