America First
Copyright © 1981
by James Magorian
Black Oak Press
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In Nebraska writer James Magorian's comic novel America First
the reformers are in power. Congress has been abolished, the
members jailed for corruption. Laws are madeby people voting
in national referendums on the administration's whimsically
extreme decrees, President Luther Hodge assebles a fanatical
cabinet made up mostly of women, blacks, Hispanics, and other
minorities, including an Arab Secretary of Transportation named
Ali Baba Hasan. These cabinet officers and the female
Vice-President work to transform the country into a liberal paradise.
The Surgeon General sends the 82nd Airborne into American cities
to enforce the national nonsmoking ban and lower-cholesterol
regulations, Secretary of Interior, Chief Herniated Bear, turns
whole states into Indian reservations and wildlife refuges.
Secretary of Commerce Shirley Mandelbaum solves Japanese trade
problems with one memo. And there are a half dozen new cabinet
posts like the Secretary of Used Cars, the Secretary of Silence,
and the Secretary of Population, Emick Millstone, whose zero
population growth policies are often in conflict with programs
of the Department of Carnal Activity, headed by the voluptuous
Misty Ultimate. America First is a funny romp through the
corridors of power, zany bureaucrats correcting all America's
problems. — Tom Jennings
Long overdue. I'm buying copies for my friends. — Franklin Delano
Roosevelt
A funny and formidable treatise. — John Stuart Mill
I tumble to the floor in mirth. — David Hume
Verily, it doth make all my work for naught. — Thomas Aquinas
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Aviatrix
Copyright © 2006
by James Magorian
Black Oak Press
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In his poem Aviatrix James Magorian explores American culture in the formative
years of the 20th century. His speaker is both receiver and creator of the shaping
forces, a voice reckoning technology and transgressed nature,
the arts and mass media. Historical events are revived with rich, inventive language,
a skillful mix of ideas and images, providing a wondrous parable of our communal
ties, demonic tendencies, the blunt routines, mystical flashes and transcendences of the
ordinary day. — from the publisher
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Haymarket Square
Copyright © 1998
by James Magorian
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In his narrative poem Haymarket Square James Magorian explores the
roots of modern America: the shift from rural to urban life, ethnic conflict,
environmental degradation, class struggle, varieties of religious
experience, eruptions of violence. In the tradition of Stephen Vincent
Benét's John Brown's Body and Robert Penn Warren's
Audubon, A
Vision, he hangs literary flesh on historical event with rich,
inventive language, a skillful mix of ideas and images that illuminates the
lives of those caught in the accelerating pace, complexity, and social
Darwinism of the late nineteenth century. At the height of a long and
distinguished career, James Magorian provides a wondrous account of our
communal ties, demonic tendencies, the blunt routines, the mystical flashes
and transcendences of the ordinary day. — from the jacket
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Catalpa Blossoms
Copyright © 1994
by James Magorian
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James Magorian ... for more than twenty years has quietly constructed an
immense, impressive,
and distinctive body of work best
described as "Americana." Along the way Magorian has experimented with
voices, becoming misleadingly known to some extent as an exuberant comic;
but his best work is biographical, based
like Catalpa Blossoms, on the lives of pioneers. — Small
Press Review
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Hearts of Gold
Copyright © 1996
by James Magorian
Acme Press
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Hearts of Gold is a fast-paced, slapstick comedy in which a
motley group of fortune hunters — a gambler, a college
instructor Professor Stennerflit and his daughter Amelia, an
art gallery guard named Zolly, the old iddy Poet Laureate
of Omaha Agnes Tate Brine, the president of a flying saucer
spotters club Edelson Ponk, and an amnesiac given the name
Jeeves and assigned the flunky tasks of the expedition — go
in search of the Lost Dutchman gold mine, following a map
that places the mine not in the mountains of Arizona but
in western Nebraska. The prospectors, traveling not by
burro but luxurious Toyota Land Cruiser, are pursued by
two dim-witted thugs employed by Bruno "the Hammer"
Sorklemyer, an Omaha loan shark who is owed money by the gambler.
Also in the caper is a bumbling rogue FBI agent, Wade
Mindock, out for himself and the skeptical local sheriff,
Camber Luggins, who gets involved because it's an
opportunity to miss his grandson's birthday party. A romance
between the gambler and Amelia Stennerflit humorously
complicates the prospecting, as does the fact that the
old mine is located on land claimed by a hillbilly couple
Milbert and Levada Roatcap, whose three PBS-watching sons
are Ivy League-bound as soon as the hog slaughtering
season is over, and claimed by the nearby Gnostic monastery
of Mount Ponderosa, headed by Bishop Anastasias and manned
by monks like Brother Flapjack, Brother One-Eyed Charley,
and Brother Wild Ed, whose divine calling includes cattle
rustling. After many slapstick episodes, all these
characters are brought together in a madcap finale. — from the jacket
Hearts of Gold is reminiscent of the great comic embroideries
of Thorne Smith, Max Shulman, and SJ Perelman, with touches of the
plotting of Donald E Westlake and he ribaldry of Tom Robbins. It's the
funnniest book I've read in years. — Jack Olsen
I found Hearts of Gold hilarious! "Easy Street" McShane is going to
go down in that delightful history book of warm-hearted scoundrels who
make us
laugh out loud. Hearts of Gold is a primer for would-be con-men,
and a feast for
those weary of depression and disaster. I loved this book! — Ann Rule
Take a lost gold mine, salt it with a plot that's a riot from beginning
to end, add a posse of
gun-toting monks and a turkey with a bent for destruction, and the result is
an unputdownable treat of a book. James Magorian is a writer with a
wicked sense
of humour that I predict we'll see a lot more of. — Kay Mitchell
Magorian, an author of children's books and poetry, is a breezy storyteller
with a knack for quirky dialogue. —
Publishers Weekly
Hearts of Gold is an action-adventure/quest-venture parody, a rural,
small-town, back-roads caricature — a cartoon in the best sense meant
for Saturday morning entertainment back when Saturday morning cartoons
were truly entertaining. — Gretchen Ronnow, Nebraska Territory
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The Hideout of the Sigmund Freud Gang
Copyright © 1987
by James Magorian
Black Oak Press
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For fifteen years the slapstick-surrealistic poems
of James Magorian have appeared in literary magazines and
been published in collections by small presses. One of the
foremost chroniclers of the loopy American angst, James
Magorian concocts a satire that is both whimsical and
accusatory. Like Kurt Vonnegut and the late Richard
Brautigan, he sculpts from the monumental insignificances
of everyday life. The Hideout of the Sigmund Freud Gang
brings together the satirical poems and visuals from
earlier books and includes such "revisions" of American
history as The Eily Dickinson Jogging Book, The Red,
White, and Blue Bus, and The Great Injun Carnival, which
purports to be the secret diary of General Custer.
— Tom Jennings
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Kaaterskill Clove
Copyright © 2000, 2009
by James Magorian
Black Oak Press
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A long poem about landscape painting, parts of which were first published in The Antioch Review, The Ohio Poetry Review, Parnassus Literary
Journal, and elsewhere.
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