Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Preface to “Beauty and the Least”

While we await the finishing details of the cover design for Andy Nowicki's BEAUTY AND THE LEAST with bated breath, I'll go ahead and tease you with a cut from my publisher's preface to the work. Don't worry, teasing swipes from the text itself will appear here on Thursday; it'll take me a bit longer to pick the most likely bit from that.


The intention of the nous, the question of whether God, or the Mind of the Universe, or however you imagine the face of your tormentor, has a plan for you—or whether he has it in for you— is off the table in our animated-graphics-packed world of public debate. 
 
The question of whether God is real or not makes far better video: Of course He’s good if He’s real, and there’s a Paradise you’ll be missing, you filthy and hideous sinner!—and if he isn’t, then of course you’re an ass for believing in him, and of course I’m right, you unwashed bumpkin! And of course the equally important question of who He, in His infinite love and wisdom, loves the best, is even more cinematic: Sometimes people throw punches! (Or airplanes.) 


For the time, it seems, the actual nature of the soul of the universe has been taken for granted, at least in the blessed realm of the televised and viral. Its inky black holes and meaningless waste spaces, literal and metaphorical, have been relegated to the less glamorous realm of science and the even less glamorous, more obscure, and tattered hovel of the written word. Fiction in particular.

Enter some losers.



OK, that's enough for now. Wait a few days and get ready to throw the author a few denarii for his labors, he's got a family to feed. And all profits that don't go to Amazon go directly to the authors. Go ahead, call me a hippie, I can take it.




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