Acting Alone is the second book in The Sam Edwine Pentateuch. Acting Alone opens at a cow college in Kansas, proceeds to holiday doings in Kiev, Nebraska, home of a disturbed young Marine recently released by the Revolutionary Guards in Iran, then spirals unpredictably toward Cheyenne Mountain, home of NORAD (the North American Air Defense Command) and the convent of the Servant Sisters of Saint Willibrord of Perpetual Adoration. There a dangerous plot spun by a renegade Mormon threatens to upset the protagonist's plans for material and marital well being.
"The contemporaries of Michelangelo found it useful to employ the term terribilita to characterize some of the expressions of his genius, and I will quote it here to sum up the shocking impact of this novel as a whole. I read it in a state of fascination, admiration, awe, anxiety, and outrage."
--R.V. Cassill, editor of THE NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF SHORT FICTION
The book is availible from Buy.com in hardcover or softcover.
Black Class Cur, the third book in The Sam Edwine Pentateuch, was written after two years of living in the People's Republic of China, and set in that country on the eve of the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
The main characters are a former Red Guard still trying to fight the Cultural Revolution in a remote rural area, and his younger brother who gets fatally involved in the student demonstrations. They come up against an American "foreign expert" who represents everything they despise, but whose preoccupation is locating a baby to adopt, with or without the help of a variegated gang of third-world medical students.
During his stay in China, Tom Bradley kept his writing secret and avoided becoming reclassified as a journalist, so his movements were largely unrestricted. He traveled to closed cities and met all kinds of people: model citizens as well as derelicts and subversives. He saw a side of this strange place that nobody has reported on yet. As John Updike wrote to him, "Your China experience should stand you in good stead: that vast land is still terra incognita as far as the eye of fiction is concerned." Black Class Cur, which was nominated for the Editor's Book Award, is availible in paperback from Barnes and Noble.
The Curved Jewels is the fifth, and logically the final, book in The Sam Edwine Pentateuch. In The Curved Jewels, the Crown Princess of Japan gets tired of her living-death in the Imperial Palace, and escapes with the help of a couple of shady American expatriates.
The world knows this woman as a brilliant linguist and career diplomat who somehow got coerced into marrying the grandson of Hirohito. The novel shows how that might have happened.
"You wanted to write a controversial work, and you have. I doubt you'll ever get it reviewed in Japan."
Donald Richie, The Japan Times
The book is availible in paperback from Alibris.com.
The fourth book in The Sam Edwine Pentateuch, Kara-Kun, Flip Kun is two-part novel set in Hiroshima, half a century after the fact.
The title character of Kara-Kun is an ethnic Korean who was in utero at the moment of the atom bomb's detonation. As a result of prenatal exposure to gamma rays, he is tiny and mentally deficient, like many such "bomb babies," but his physical vigor is unimpaired. Living on a makeshift skiff on the river that runs through town, Kara-kun only comes ashore to disrupt high-tone weddings at the cathedral. It's a hobby for him.
Not surprisingly, Kara-kun disappears soon after spoiling a Yakuza wedding. The main part of the narrative shows the efforts of the expatriate community (a very mixed bunch, from all over the first, second and third worlds) to locate him. They send the reluctant and inefficient Sam Edwine to scour Hiroshima for some sign of Kara-kun, whom they've adopted as a mascot.
In Flip-Kun, Sam Edwine is being stalked through Hiroshima by "hit-missionaries" from a certain well-established American pseudo-religion, whose patriarchs suspect him of being the author of a blasphemous book, and have declared a western-style fatwa on his head.
"Tom Bradley's formidable prose evokes the work of two other towering Toms: Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow) and Robbins (Even Cowgirls Get the Blues). Like Pynchon, Bradley possesses a technicolor imagination and the power to wield language like a stun gun; but he tempers his spiraling narrative with a reasonably linear story-line, and his cynicism with genuine affection for his characters, a la Robbins."
-- Mainichi Daily News
Kara-Kun, Flip-Kun is availible in paperback from Barnes and Noble.
Hustling the East is a single-volume collection of Tom Bradley's Japan novels, featuring that disgruntled expatriate, Sam Edwine. Hustling the East includes
the Abiko Quarterly Award-winning Kara-Kun, and the controversial Curved Jewels.
The first book in The Sam Edwine Pentateuch is Killing Bryce. Killing Bryce shows the disintegration of a family of Jack-Mormons who get scattered across two continents like bits of rock salt sprayed from the muzzle of a shotgun. The book was a finalist in the AWP Award Series in the Novel, and was nominated for the New York University Bobst Award.