Monday, July 26, 2010

Cover art - "Up the Bright River" by Philip José Farmer

In December, Subterranean Press will release a collection of short stories by Philip José Farmer, “Up the Bright River”, and yesterday the publisher showed us the artwork for the dust jacket of the book made by the great artist, Bob Eggleton. I find this cover to be exceptionally beautiful, a scene of epic proportions and a landscape in the true style of Bob Eggleton. The colors, the light and shadows of the painting create an artwork of true beauty. It is one of the covers that make me pick a book from the bookshop shelves without taking into consideration the name of the book or the author. But Philip José Farmer’s “Up the Bright River” offers excellent material between the covers too, with a few of Philip José Farmer’s early works and some of the out-of-print tales, but also “Riverworld” stories collected for the first time. Here is the Subterranean Press presentation of the upcoming Philip José Farmer’s “Up the Bright River”:

This first posthumous collection of the short fiction of Philip Jose Farmer is a celebration of the impressive variety of his prodigious output, from the space adventures he published in the science fiction magazines of the 1950s through the 1970s, to his acerbic satires of religion and medicine, to his fictional biographies and memoirs, to his beloved Riverworld.
Appearing for the first time in a Philip Jose Farmer collection are his last three “Riverworld” stories—featuring characters from his own family history--as well as the “memoir” of Lord Greystoke which he claimed to have merely edited. Other highlights include “Attitudes,” the first of the Father Carmody stories; “The Two-Edged Gift,” which introduces the fictional science fiction writer Leo Queequeg Tincrowdor; “Toward the Beloved City” (about which its original editor said he had never before really understood the Book of Revelations); and “Father’s in the Basement,” a little-known Gothic horror tale which is also a satire of the writing profession.
Farmer created some of the most famous worlds in science fiction, but he also wrote
in many worlds, and readers familiar only with his best-known classics may find a few surprises among these tales.

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