The Ballad of Billie Potts

By Robert Penn Warren

Illustrations by P. John Burden

Introduction by John Burt

MID-CENTURY AMERICA’S MOST PROFOUND & HAUNTING POEM IS GIVEN NEW DIMENSION IN NEW, RICHLY ILLUSTRATED EDITION FROM BUNIM & BANNIGAN

“There is always another country and always another place.

There is always another name and another face.”

One of the most significant early works of Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989) – the American writer and literary critic who is the only person to have won Pulitzer Prizes in both fiction and poetry – The Ballad of Billie Potts has, in the decades since it was released in Warren’s 1943 volume Selected Poems, proven far more universal than its setting of the “land between the rivers” (a marshy, dense, almost primeval bottomland between the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers in western Kentucky) might suggest.

         Inspired by the folk tales of Warren’s native state – “When I was a child I heard this story from an old lady who was a relative of mine,” he wrote in the original preface – The Ballad of Billie Potts is, on its face, a simple, if unsettling, story:

A murderous innkeeper, named Billie Potts, and his wife have a son -- Little Billie -- whom they both adore. In an attempt to impress his parents, Little Billie attempts to rob and kill a passing traveller… but, in his fumbling inexperience, botches the job and returns home in humiliation. In anger, his father turns him away to make his fortune on his own. Years later, having prospered out West, Little Billie returns to the land between rivers – only to be killed for a bag of gold by his own parents, who mistook him for a wealthy traveller before realizing, through an identifying birthmark, that they have killed the only person they ever loved.

         With thematic and moral keynotes that would concern Warren for a lifetime – the passage from childhood innocence into guilt, the journey that ends with a return to the father or to the place of origin, the undiscovered self, and a certain mysticism that unites each individual with humankind and with nature – The Ballad of Billie Potts is a haunting tale that is firmly rooted in its time and place of origin, and also deeply relevant to contemporary concerns, such as capitalism and the destruction of our planet.

        This classic of mid-century American literature is now available to the modern reader with the release of a new edition of The Ballad of Billie Potts on XXX, 2017 – featuring a thought-provoking new introduction from John Burt and powerful, fantastic-realist illustrations by artist P. John Burden.

“Even the briefest retelling of the story cannot fail to render its harsh ironic force,” writes Burt – who is a Professor of English at Brandeis University, and the literary executor for Robert Penn Warren – in the new edition’s foreword. “The land between the rivers is a place where life and death run together, a place in which even mere physical nature, never mind symbolic nature, equates the ripe and the rotten, life in its swarming foulness with life descending past rankness into rot.

“It is perhaps not unusual to see the world of modernity as rootless,” he continues, “this has been modernity’s complaint about itself since it first began to be conceived as modernity, and it is perhaps its identifying characteristic. But it is unusual to see the rooted alternative to modernity in such dark terms, as if the ultimate focus of longing is not, say, a traditional ideal of knowing and being so much as a devastating experience of dark transcendence which affirms and annihilates at the same moment. The poem leaves the reader with the choice Nietzsche once articulated: the choice between being void of purpose and having the void itself as purpose.”

About John Burt:

John Burt is Professor of English at Brandeis University. He is the author of Robert Penn Warren and American Idealism, and the editor of The Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren. He is also the literary executor for Robert Penn Warren. In addition, he is the author of Lincoln's Tragic Pragmatism, and three volumes of poetry.

About P. John Burden:

Visual artist P. John Burden is a classically trained Canadian and British subject. Burden’s work includes original acrylic paintings, watercolour paintings, and traditional and modern artist’s prints. His art is symbolic or surrealist, using representational skills from a lifetime of drawing, painting, and design. Burden also illustrates books for all ages, and has work in collections worldwide.

The Handicapper

A novel by: ROBERT KALICH

The Handicapper is a compelling story that exposes the frenzy, passion, madness - the unmitigated craziness - of all our life and death struggles to make it.

David Lazar, passionate, excessive, riddled with contradictions and soaring ambitions, is a compulsive gambler.  He is hopelessly in debt and stuck in a humdrum job that can't support his addiction. He is fighting to keep the wife he idolizes, who cannot live with his gambling loses. Lazar is left with no other options but to fight back and find a way to succeed.

Lazar takes control of life.  He calls upon the expertise of his all-powerful friends—Nathan Rubin, the money obsessed CEO, and Solomon Lepidus, the man who can afford to gamble for fun.  Basketball is Lazar's game, and he studies the teams, the plays and the betting.  He uses the energy of his obsession to beat that very obsession, to become the most knowledgeable man in the country about college basketball.  He builds a network of tipsters, produces a more accurate 'line' of point spreads than the Vegas experts, wagers—and beats them at their own game. 

The Handicapper is the story of one of those rare instances in which an individual beats the system, and it tells in fascinating detail just how it was done. But it is more than that. It is also the story of a tormented soul, cursed by spiritual poverty, driven by an inner necessity to climb "Mount Gamble" only to discover that winning sometimes mean losing.

Praise for the works of Robert Kalich

“Kalich has written a compelling novel that transmits the flat-out thrills of putting your money where your heart is. Yet, he has produced a book that presents to the logical mind – which has no relationship to the gambling mind – a tale of what betting is all about. The Handicapper is alive. Bet on it.” -- Sports Illustrated

"Kalich's fellow gambling devotees--sports-betting division especially--will appreciate the in-the-know details here. . . and maybe the sheer wish-fulfillment too." -- Kirkus Reviews

"The Handicapper is an exceptionally good novel and yet so much more. It is probably the most illuminating novel about the topic of sports gambling I have ever read." -- Bert Sugar, Writer & Sports Historian

______________________________

ROBERT KALICH is a born-and-bred New Yorker. He is the author of several non-fiction books and four novels, including The Investigation of Ariel Warning. Three of his novels are works of autofiction based on his life and intimate knowledge of sports and gambling: The Handicapper, a national best-seller now available in an anniversary edition,  David Lazar, and Impossible to Be Human. Robert Kalich is an avid reader and maintains a home library of 10,000 books. He lives with his wife and son in NYC and North Salem, NY.

The River and the Horsemen - A Novel of the Little Bighorn

AUTHOR:  ROBERT SKIMIN

An outstanding fictional account of the confrontation between Chief Sitting Bull and the U.S. Cavalry under General Custer.

The most compelling account of the Little Bighorn ever written, this powerfully detailed historical novel–imagined on an epic scale with all of the grandeur of the Gilded Age in the East and the Yellowstone country in the West, vividly recreates the lives of two of the most celebrated leaders of nineteenth century, General George Armstrong Custer and Chief Sitting Bull.

Rich in detail of Sioux spirituality and culture, as well as the American history and politics of the post–Civil War period, master storyteller Robert Skimin spins an intriguing tale of the personal and political events that led to one of the bloodiest days in western warfare–an infamous day that still captures the imaginations of men and women everywhere.

Neither saint nor demon, Custer is, fascinating, arrogant, yet a vulnerable human being. The Battle of the Little Bighorn itself, described in all of its frightening detail, marks the collision of two civilizations: one reaching for its manifest destiny, one struggling for survival.

Robert Elwayne Skimin was born and raised in Medina County, Ohio. He enlisted in the Army at age eighteen and was soon its fourth youngest officer. He saw combat as a paratrooper, an artillery officer, and Army aviator, was the first Army pilot to wear the famed Green Beret, and was decorated several times. Skimin is the author of nineteen books including The Booze Game; Soldier for Hire, a four-volume male adventure series; Chikara!, which won the prestigious Ohioana Book Award; Gray Victory, an alternative history in which the South has won the Civil War; Renegade Lightning (with Ferdie Pacheco), a WWII airwar novel; and Apache Autumn, an historical novel of the Apaches that was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. His sweeping novel of twentieth-century Russia, Derzhava, is in progress. Skimin is also the creator of an illustrated history series for children Danny Drumm’s Heroes, launched in 2006.  He lives in El Paso, Texas.

REVIEWS:

"...the author knows what he’s doing." - Texas Monthly

"...intensely researched and entirely credible fiction." - Rocky Mountain News

"A bold invention and skillful adaptation of the diverse threads of legend, lore, and history. . . . truly distinguished historical fiction." - Library Journal

The Same Old Story

By Ivan Goncharov

Translated by Stephen Pearl

Stephen Pearl’s new translation of Goncharov’s Obyknovennaya Istoriya, will introduce English speakers to a Russian classic that made its author famous, and which is just as amusing and fascinating as Goncharov’s better known Oblomov, which probably owes its greater fame to the fact that the self-indulgence of the eponymous Oblomov became part of the Russian vocabulary. The same psychological insight that makes Oblomov so compelling permeates The Same Old Story with its contrast between Alexander, a young nobleman fresh from the simplicity of country life, and the older uncle, Pyotr. Readers of whatever age and from very milieu will recognize in themselves Alexander’s unreal ambitions and expectations and the sadder but wiser responses of Uncle Pyotr.

     As Nicholas Lezard said, in reviewing this new translation in the British Guardian, Goncharov’s genius lies in his ability to make us root for both: for the young foolish romantic nephew who believes in the “greatness of soul and the imperishability of true love,” and for his uncle, whose ‘job,’ as he sees it, is to ” drive all this rubbish from Alexander’s head.”