Herovit's World

<p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 0.9); color: rgba(64 64 64 1)>Jonathan Herovit used to be a rising star in science fiction. Now he's paralyzed by domestic anxieties creative exhaustion and an industry that happily consumes its own. Haunted by his wife's post-partum depression hobbled by his own worsening alcoholism and mocked by the impossible deadline of a novel he cannot bring himself to face Herovit retreats further and further into the margins of his life. Then things get truly strange: Kirk Poland-Herovit's hard-boiled hyper-competent pseudonym-begins to speak to him critique him threaten him and offer a seductive alternative to everything the author hates about himself fracturing the divide between person and persona. What follows is Barry N. Malzberg at his most incisive and self-lacerating: a comedic nightmare of writerly neurosis genre politics and the psychoses baked into American professional life.</span></p><p></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 0.9); color: rgba(64 64 64 1)>First published in 1973 </span><em style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 0.9); color: rgba(64 64 64 1)>Herovit's World</em><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 0.9); color: rgba(64 64 64 1)> remains uncannily contemporary. The teeth of Malzberg's satire have only grown sharper with time in his most self-reflexive novel which exposes the anxieties of late-capitalist creativity fan culture toxic ambition and the paranoid machinery of pulp publishing. This anti-oedipal edition includes a foreword by D. Harlan Wilson an introduction by Paul Di Filippo and an afterword by Malzberg himself-one of the last pieces he wrote before logging out of reality's submission portal in 2024.</span></p>