Pull Devil Pull Baker

<p><strong>Pull Devil Pull Baker</strong> is one of the most innovative autobiographies/biographies ever written.</p><p></p><p>The novelist Stella Benson first encountered an eccentric Russian nobleman Count Nicolas de Toulouse Lautrec De Savine in the pauper's ward of a Hong Kong hospital. Striking up a friendship she found herself fascinated by the Count's garrulous memoirs written in a unique blend of English French and Russian.</p><p></p><p>The Count's adventures included a stint as a Russian cavalry officer gold mining in California a failed attempt to establish himself as Czar of Bulgaria a number of get-rich-quick schemes and countless romantic entanglements. Were these all inventions of his fervid mind like a latter-day Baron Munchausen? Were they true? Could they be both?</p><p></p><p>In <strong>Pull Devil Pull Baker</strong> Stella Benson not only collected the Count's fascinatingly barmy recollections but provided a virtuosic running commentary that reflects on the nature of memory truth and the power of storytelling. In the process she created a book that anticipates by decades the new nonfiction school of such bestsellers as The Lifespan of a Fact and in various ways the work of Geoff Dyer W. G. Sebald Maggie Nelson Ben Lerner Chris Kraus Miranda July and many others who today flicker creatively between fiction and fact.</p>