Auguries

About the Book

CATTER LIVES!

An improbable classic of rural American literature, AUGURIES is the harrowing tale of fourteen year-old Catter Knopfler, who is removed from his home in the farm town of Vesuvius and institutionalized-until he escapes into the winter city streets, a hunchbacked fugitive in a stolen purple confessional curtain.

First offered for publication in 1986 as "an uplifting story of incest, murder, and grotesque suffering," AUGURIES met with a chilling reception. No publisher would touch it.

But like its doughty narrator, AUGURIES endured. Photocopied, passed from hand to hand, and advertised only by word of mouth, the rejected typescript of AUGURIES became an almost instant rarity of the American underground press. While reportedly widely pirated abroad in an unauthorized Chinese translation, the corporate-controlled publishing industry in the United States conspired for years to keep AUGURIES off bookstore shelves. By the time CATTER LIVES! began to appear emblazoned on the walls of the New York City subway, AUGURIES had transcended censorship, critical indifference, and its own gnomic title to become a mythic literary phenomenon.

About the Author

Russell Fox left the farmlands of Pompey, New York, after high school and worked as a stagehand. His first play was greeted by critics as ?an eminently playable piece? and ?a work that deserves to be taken seriously." Obscurity followed. He is now a lawyer for abused and neglected children in Buffalo, New York.