Tom Bradley (author)
Encyclopedia
Short Stories
Short Stories may refer to:*A plural for Short story*Short Stories , an American pulp magazine published from 1890-1959*Short Stories, a 1954 collection by O. E...
. He is the author of The Sam Edwine Pentateuch, a five-book series, various volumes of which have been nominated for the Editor's Book Award, the New York University
New York University
New York University is a private, nonsectarian research university based in New York City. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan...
Bobst Prize, and the AWP
Association of Writers & Writing Programs
The Association of Writers & Writing Programs is a literary organization whose mission is "to foster literary talent and achievement, to advance the art of writing as essential to a good education, and to serve the makers, teachers, students, and readers of contemporary writing."-Members:AWP...
Award Series in the Novel. Tom Bradley's nonfiction is regularly featured by Arts & Letters Daily
Arts & Letters Daily
Arts & Letters Daily is a web portal owned by The Chronicle of Higher Education. It features links to a diverse array of news stories, features and reviews from throughout the online Anglosphere, each introduced with a short blurb or teaser...
, and has also appeared in Salon.com
Salon.com
Salon.com, part of Salon Media Group , often just called Salon, is an online liberal magazine, with content updated each weekday. Salon was founded by David Talbot and launched on November 20, 1995. It was the internet's first online-only commercial publication. The magazine focuses on U.S...
, McSweeney's Internet Tendency
McSweeney's
McSweeney's is an American publishing house founded by editor Dave Eggers.Apart from its book list, McSweeney's is responsible for four regular publications: the quarterly literary journal,...
, and Ambit Magazine
Ambit (magazine)
Ambit is a literary periodical published in the United Kingdom. It was founded in 1959 by Dr Martin Bax, a London paediatrician.Uniting art, prose, poetry and reviews, the magazine appears quarterly and is distributed internationally. Notable Ambit contributors have included J. G. Ballard, Eduardo...
. He has been characterized as an "outsider" by the LA Times book blog.
His sixth book, Fission Among the Fanatics, was named Non-Fiction Book of the Year 2007 by 3:AM Magazine
3:AM Magazine
3:AM Magazine is a literary magazine, which was set up as 3ammagazine.com in April 2000 and is edited from Paris. Its editor-in-chief since inception has been Andrew Gallix, a lecturer at the Sorbonne ....
, with the citation, a literary giant among pygmies. NPR
NPR
NPR, formerly National Public Radio, is a privately and publicly funded non-profit membership media organization that serves as a national syndicator to a network of 900 public radio stations in the United States. NPR was created in 1970, following congressional passage of the Public Broadcasting...
commentator Andrei Codrescu
Andrei Codrescu
Andrei Codrescu is a Romanian-born American poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and commentator for National Public Radio. He was Mac Curdy Distinguished Professor of English at Louisiana State University from 1984 until his retirement in 2009....
called this book "the first appearance of a genre so strange we are turning away from naming it..." The publication of his seventh book, Lemur, by Raw Dog Screaming Press is part of the Bizarro fiction
Bizarro fiction
Bizarro fiction is a contemporary literary genre, which often utilizes elements of absurdism, satire, and the grotesque, along with pop-surrealism and genre fiction staples, in order to create subversive works that are as weird and entertaining as possible. The term was adopted in 2005 by the...
movement. According to The Advocate
The Advocate
The Advocate is an American LGBT-interest magazine, printed monthly and available by subscription. The Advocate brand also includes a web site. Both magazine and web site have an editorial focus on news, politics, opinion, and arts and entertainment of interest to LGBT people...
, "[Lemur] could do as much to raise the rainbow flag as two medium-size Midwestern Stonewall Day parades." Tom Bradley has meanwhile contributed to the theoretical elucidation of the Bizarro aesthetic with his criticism and his interviews. His eighth novel, Vital Fluid, is based on the life, writings and performances of stage hypnotist
Stage hypnosis
Stage hypnosis is hypnosis performed in front of an audience for the purposes of entertainment, usually in a theatre or club. Expert opinion is divided over whether participants' responses are best explained as being due to an altered state of consciousness or by a combination of deliberate...
John-Ivan Palmer and was published by Crossing Chaos Enigmatic Ink.
Biography
Tom Bradley was born in Utah during a time when of hydrogen bomb tests were still performed aboveground. In later life, he lived in the People's Republic of ChinaPeople's Republic of China
China , officially the People's Republic of China , is the most populous country in the world, with over 1.3 billion citizens. Located in East Asia, the country covers approximately 9.6 million square kilometres...
for many years and lost friends in the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
The author has stated that as an unintended victim of US nuclear testing
Downwinders
Downwinders refers to individuals and communities who are exposed to radioactive contamination or nuclear fallout from atmospheric or underground nuclear weapons testing, and nuclear accidents...
, he gravitated to Hiroshima
Hiroshima
is the capital of Hiroshima Prefecture, and the largest city in the Chūgoku region of western Honshu, the largest island of Japan. It became best known as the first city in history to be destroyed by a nuclear weapon when the United States Army Air Forces dropped an atomic bomb on it at 8:15 A.M...
and Nagasaki, where he has written strident criticisms of the Japanese educational system In the opinion of Israeli journalist Barry Katz, who writes for 3:AM Magazine
3:AM Magazine
3:AM Magazine is a literary magazine, which was set up as 3ammagazine.com in April 2000 and is edited from Paris. Its editor-in-chief since inception has been Andrew Gallix, a lecturer at the Sorbonne ....
in Paris, Tom Bradley deliberately courts controversy: "He does seem bent on leaving absolutely nobody unpissed-off. His venom’s no less ecumenical than gratuitous." Rain Taxi Review of Books
Rain Taxi
Rain Taxi is a Minneapolis-based book review and literary organization. In addition to publishing its quarterly print edition, Rain Taxi maintains an online edition with distinct content, sponsors the Twin Cities Book Festival, hosts readings, and publishes chapbooks through its Brainstorm Series...
expresses the notion as follows: "As proof of his leaving no one un-offended, he's been nudged out of every university where he has taught. For the past two decades he has lived the life of an ex-pat laugh assassin, tucked away in a volcanic mountain on the island of Kyushu".
However, in composing the Critical Appendix for Fission Among the Fanatics, Advocate
The Advocate
The Advocate is an American LGBT-interest magazine, printed monthly and available by subscription. The Advocate brand also includes a web site. Both magazine and web site have an editorial focus on news, politics, opinion, and arts and entertainment of interest to LGBT people...
writer Cye Johan arrived at a different conclusion: "I tell you that Dr. Bradley has devoted his existence to writing because he intends for every center of consciousness, everywhere, in all planes and conditions (not just terrestrial female Homo sapiens in breeding prime), to love him forever, starting as soon as possible, though he's prepared to wait thousands of centuries after he's dead".
He claims paternal descent from Mormon
Mormon
The term Mormon most commonly denotes an adherent, practitioner, follower, or constituent of Mormonism, which is the largest branch of the Latter Day Saint movement in restorationist Christianity...
handcart pioneers who were excommunicated almost immediately upon arriving in Deseret
State of Deseret
The State of Deseret was a proposed state of the United States, propositioned in 1849 by Latter-day Saint settlers in Salt Lake City. The provisional state existed for slightly over two years and was never recognized by the United States government...
, from whom he inherited his "whole hefty metabolism" and his remarkable height. 3:AM Magazine
3:AM Magazine
3:AM Magazine is a literary magazine, which was set up as 3ammagazine.com in April 2000 and is edited from Paris. Its editor-in-chief since inception has been Andrew Gallix, a lecturer at the Sorbonne ....
describes him as "sociopathically
Antisocial personality disorder
Antisocial personality disorder is described by the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, fourth edition , as an Axis II personality disorder characterized by "...a pervasive pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others that begins in childhood...
tall." He also claims to have descended maternally from an earlier Nagasaki expatriate, Thomas Blake Glover
Thomas Blake Glover
Thomas Blake Glover, Order of the Rising Sun was a Scottish merchant in Bakumatsu and Meiji period Japan.-Early life :...
.
Regarding the question of the extent to which his fictional alter-ego, Sam Edwine, is autobiographical, Tom Bradley has written that while the character is more intelligent and has had a great variety of experiences that he has not, they are essentially alike.
Interviews
- The Evil Glee, at 3:AM Magazine3:AM Magazine3:AM Magazine is a literary magazine, which was set up as 3ammagazine.com in April 2000 and is edited from Paris. Its editor-in-chief since inception has been Andrew Gallix, a lecturer at the Sorbonne ....
- This Elevated Pitch, at Dogmatika
- Chuffed to Be Dunked in Duchamp's Pissoir, at Word RiotWord RiotWord Riot is an American online magazine that publishes poetry, flash fiction, short stories, novel excerpts, creative nonfiction, reviews, and interviews. The magazine was launched in March 2002 by author and publisher Jackie Corley with the help of the late Paula Anderson. In 2003, a publishing...
- Bizarro is My God-Baby, at Unlikely Stories
Nonfiction
- Put It Down in a Book, The Drill Press, 2009
- Fission Among the Fanatics, Spuyten Duyvil Books (NYC), 2007
(Both recipients of the 3:AM Magazine
3:AM Magazine
3:AM Magazine is a literary magazine, which was set up as 3ammagazine.com in April 2000 and is edited from Paris. Its editor-in-chief since inception has been Andrew Gallix, a lecturer at the Sorbonne ....
Non-Fiction Book of the Year Award)
- My Hands Were Clean, Unlikely Books, 2010
- Epigonesia (with Kane X. Faucher), Blaze Vox Books, 2010
- New Cross Musings on a Manic Reality (editor), Dog Horn Publishing, 2011
Fiction
- Bomb Baby, Enigmatic Ink, 2010
- Hemorrhaging Slave of an Obese Eunuch, Dog Horn Publishing, 2010
- Calliope's Boy, Black Rainbows Press, 2010
- Vital Fluid, Crossing Chaos, 2009
- Even the Dog Won't Touch Me, Ahadada BooksAhadada BooksAhadada Books is a small press based in Tokyo, Japan and Toronto, Canada, specializing in new and experimental poetry and prose. Established in 1998 by Jesse Glass, with the assistance of Daniel Sendecki, its authors include Alan Halsey, Geraldine Monk, Eileen Tabios, Yoko Danno, Jack Foley, Skip...
, 2009 - Lemur, Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2008
- Acting Alone: a novel of nuns, neo-Nazis and NORAD, Browntrout Books, 1995; 2nd ed., Drill Press, 2010