Richard Monaco

Richard Monaco is most wel-known for his best-selling Parsival novels, published between 1977 and 2012, two of which were Pulitzer Prize finalists. In a career spanning almost four decades, Monaco has published eighteen books with more on the way. He studied musical composition at Columbia University, was the editor of a national student newspaper and a poetry magazine. He also had a radio talk show based on his textbook The Logic of Poetry. He has taught and lectured on writing, and written Hollywood screenplays as well as stage plays. In 1979, he cofounded a NYC literary agency, and in 2015, he co-created Grand Central Review, a quarterly online literary journal. In these pages, Richard tells the story of how he came to be a writer: growing up in NYC and upstate New York, hitchhiking across America, cab driving in Manhattan, and finally finding success as a writer with his debut novel, Parsival or a Knight's Tale.

Set some time after Lost Years: The Quest for Avalon and before The Grail War, Blood and Dreams continues the story of Parsival, who in middle age finds himself more the jaded cynic than the wide-eyed fool of his youth. Waylaid as he journeys home from his latest "bloody bit of work for Arthur," Parsival must escape his captors, save his kidnapped family, and prevent the forces of Clinschor, the mad sorcerer bent on world domination, from finding and exploiting the Holy Grail, all while enduring the disdain of his teenaged son, Lohengrin.

It's 16th Century civil war wracked Japan. Takezo, a handsome, hard-drinking: master swordsman-poet-ninja-kabuki actor-detective-bodyguard, is in love with the famous geisha Miou, and dreams of retiring with her to the mountains. Hired to find a missing noblewoman, the trail leads him through a string of puzzling geisha murders. Joined in his adventures by a diverse band of shipwrecked foreigners, he escapes several assassination attempts as he fights his way to the heart of the mystery.

LOST YEARS: THE QUEST FOR AVALON explores the tangled and forbidden love relationships of Parsival, his son, wife, Gawain and others amidst the dark magical power-plots of Morgana the witch in a Post-Apocalyptic terroristic, plague-struck world swirling with mad politics and violent religious cults.

In this revised edition of The Logic of Poetry: A Handbook of Metaphor, originally published in 1974, the authors explicate selected poems by analyzing their uses of metaphor and metaphoric device. The first two chapters of this introductory textbook are devoted to an explanation of what the authors call "the metaphoric eye," which can be described as the ability to enter the world of poetry with all senses on the alert, one poem at a timeoan ability that is learned only by experience. The next three chapters discuss specific kinds of metaphoric models. The two concluding chapters focus on advanced poetry and then address the question of what makes a poem good or bad. The various technical aspects of poetry, such as meter, rhyme, tone, and structure, are discussed in detail, and a broad cross-section of excellent English, American, French, German, and Russian poetry is selected for study. The authors have included a glossary of technical terms, a useful index, and a number of remarkable black-and-white photographs.