The Last Carnival

About the Book

In the Spring of 19- I took a sabbatical from the University of C-, over-the-seas branch, Kawagawa, Cipan where I had been working towards the postponement of a doctoral degree in the dual fields of comparative histrionics and cryptophilology. The cause of my departure: that I would pursue an ancillary degree elsewhere, although some may have observed that I had rather quietly suffered a nervous breakdown. The simple, more economical pretext, however, was that I was maddeningly overworked and shamefully underemployed. Repatriated, I finally took a job in S. Hollywood with a talent agency founded by a wealthy, enlightened Japanese autodidact of Western Culture, or "Sei Bun" as Kennichi-"Ken" to his friends-Chibita-"Chibi" by the same friends-liked to call it, who claimed, but could never quite document, a connection with his own royal family. Ken had entered the film business with the intention of "Making Movies That Make The Differences And Represent A Goal Of Universal Culture," a letterhead slogan that fell just short of the felicitous. He idolized the silver-screen impresario Alexandr Korda, and would have emulated him. Accordingly, Kenchan had acquired a reputation for his readiness to buy, at cut-rate prices, the rights to stories or, should we say, fragments of stories, incomplete or in a state of hopeless disarray, ones such as other agencies would have refused as unrepresentable. In principle we operated much like corporate marauders, but in the reverse: We bought up under-producing literary properties and then reassembled them into "marginally" profitable entities.

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.