Byzantium Endures

Overview

Long-out-of-print Moorcock classic brought back for a new generation

Meet Maxim Arturovitch Pyatnitski, also known as Pyat. Tsarist rebel, Nazi thug, continental conman and reactionary counterspy: the dark and dangerous antihero of Michael Moorcock's most controversial work. Published in 1981 to great critical acclaim—then condemned to the shadows and unavailable in the United States for 30 years—Byzantium Endures, the first of the Pyat quartet, is not a book for the faint-hearted. It is the story of a cocaine addict, sexual adventurer, and obsessive anti-Semite whose epic journey from Leningrad to London connects him with scoundrels and heroes from Trotsky to Makhno and whose career echoes that of the 20th century's descent into fascism and total war. This is Moorcock at his audacious, iconoclastic best: a grand sweeping overview of the events of the last century, as revealed in the secret journals of modern literature's most proudly unredeemable outlaw. This authoritative edition presents the author's final cut, restoring previously forbidden passages and deleted scenes.

Reviews

"A tour de force, and an extraordinary one. Mr. Moorcock has created in Pyatnitski a wholly sympathetic and highly complicated rogue . . . . There is much vigorous action here, along with a depth and an intellectuality, and humor and color and wit as well." —The New Yorker

“What is extraordinary about this novel . . . is the largeness of the design. Moorcock has the bravura of a 19th-century novelist: he takes risks, he uses fiction as if it were a divining rod for the age’s most significant concerns. Here, in Byzantium Endures, he has taken possession of the early 20th century, of a strange, dead civilization and recast them in a form which is highly charged without ceasing to be credible.” —Peter Ackroyd, Sunday Times

"While others build fictional molehills, Mr. Moorcock makes plans for great shimmering pyramids. But the footings of this particular edifice are intriguing and audacious enough to leave one hungry for more." —John Naughton, Listener

"It is a comic novel, though not a comedic one, utilizing the tropes and techniques of both modern farce and classical Commedia dell'Arte." —www.lit.NewCity.com

"Novels that teach history by telling the life story of an individual can be fascinating journeys into humanity's misadventures. Likewise, they can also be equally tragic and entertaining. One books that fits all of these adjectives and more is Michael Moorcock's Byzantium Endures." —www.CounterPunch.org

Author Biography

Michael Moorcock is the author of numerous novels, including the Elric series, Cornelius Quartet, Gloriana, and The White Wolf's Son. He has received the Nebula, World Fantasy, and British Science Fiction awards and is a Grandmaster of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. As editor of the science fiction magazine New Worlds, he was one of the progenitors of the controversial New Wave movement. His nonfiction works have appeared in the Daily Telegraph, Guardian, and New Statesman. He lives in Bastrop, Texas. Alan Wall is a novelist, a short story writer, a poet, an essayist, and a professor of writing and literature at the University of Chester. His novels include Bless the Thief, China, The Lightning Cage, The School of Night, and Sylvie's Riddle.