Laughter of Carthage

"Michael Moorcock is an absolute wizard of a storyteller. I can think of no writer like him, not here, not America. He is a wonder...it is marvelous to meet a novelist who has the energy for the epic. It is not simply a case of energy, Mr. Moorcock is also a storyteller, an old-fashioned button-holing, nineteenth-century storyteller."
--Stanley Reynolds, Punch

"This is a rich, ambitious and erudite book.... If one purpose of fiction is to lead us into different worlds and, as Virginia Woolf says, to make of them 'some kind of whole, ' then Michael Moorcock succeeds brilliantly."
--Carolyn Slaughter, The Guardian

"The Laughter of Carthage and its companion volumes will be seen... as an imaginative record of our own time rather than as a simple reconstruction of that which has gone."
--Peter Ackroyd, The Sunday Times

"The Laughter of Carthage is a formidable work in which science and technology are subordinated to narrative techniques not usually found in popular fiction... a work of grand design... cast as Pyatnitski's memoirs of a life uprooted by the Russian Revolution. He brags of his exploits as a Don Cossack; he claims pure Russian blood and a batch of patents for airplanes and automobiles. But one can never be sure that anything Pyatnitski says is true. He is certainly an egomaniac and very likely mad; he is also a reactionary Tom Swift, an anti-Semite, a sybarite and a paranoiac with a gargantuan appetite for cocaine. Rabid anti-Semitism is his way of denying the past and advancing his career as scientist and gentleman. There is also ample indication of a thin line between deceit and self-delusion. Pyat's first stop on his flight from Bolshevism is Istanbul, a teeming cosmopolis of thieves and whores but also a site idealized as the bastion of a once glorious Christendom. From there, the grotesque innocent moves west through Rome, Paris, New York City and Hollywood. Moorcock takes large risks... there are rewarding detours: lush descriptions of landscapes and the world's great cities, and a parade of characters that would feel at home in the novels of Dickens, Nabokov and Henry Miller."
--TIME