Wise Hyenas

About the Book

Once in a long while, appears a writer who is, "literally," extra-ordinary. Less extraordinarily, the works of such writers are routinely published to deaf ears: Before Moby Dick, Melville had scored two popular successes with tales of adventure on the South Seas. His finest work, spurned by contemporary American readers, was a commercial failure. Ironically, the high place now occupied by Melville's American classic is vindicated--perhaps inadvertently--in the name brand of a highly popular and successful billion-dollar corporate retailer of coffee beverages. Ironically again, the hugely successful Catcher In The Rye was cited in self-defense of a failed presidential assassin.

One moral of the story: In the near term, commercially unsuccessful books fail to gain the readers they may deserve; in the long, successful ones deserve the readers they get.

Irony and Obscurity, first cousins to the recluse, Truth, are no strangers to J Lilly. True to his roots, Lilly has "leveraged" his training in the Greek and Roman classics into a latter-day version of the Greco-Roman literary farce, which numbers post-classical practitioners as varied as Swift and Nabokov. (Contrary to received wisdom, Lolita and Gulliver's Travels are not stories about or for children.)

Wise Hyenas is a very novel ghost story for very mature readers, told from multiple points of view monitored by a Julio-Claudian observer of present-day American mores. Wise Hyenas is not a book for the culturally myopic or inattentive, the neo-puritanically moral, the artistically invertebrate, the politically punctilious, the merely legally sane. Nor is it a book for alt-Kultur reactionaries with a reflexive preference for a mythopoeic American Paradise Lost. It is a book for the studiously wise, weary of a voyeuristic society, in which the distinction between licentiousness and liberty has been perilously and perversely obscured.

Caveat lector-Let the reader beware. She is about to enter a free-spin zone.

Cover art work entitled Miro Scultore, by Joan Miro

About the Author

Lilly is the author of The Cold Zone, as well as of Manny Lesko, under the pen name, Lilly Paige White. In another walk of life, he is an international business consultant, with an interest in emerging nations.