CATALOG
Prologos
Prolgogos is Jonathan Bayliss’s sparkling, complex, experimental, playful, serious, richly detailed literary 20th-century masterpiece — whose protagonist, Michael Chapman, is the “author” or “controller” of the other three novels. No one reader will sympathize with all the manias or crochets either of Chapman or of his friend Caleb Karcist. But a thoughtful reading will engage almost anyone’s mind with the novel’s intellectual departures from traditional narrative. Prologos generates anthropological, economic, technical, and literary ideas from a base of erotic and social realism.
Prologos 978-0-9667807-0-3 paper $19.95 | 978-0-9831504-7-3 Kindle | 978-0-9831504-6-6 epub
The Three Gloucester Novels
The trilogy within the tetralogy GLOUCESTERMAN comprises the novels Gloucesterbook, Gloucestertide, and Gloucestermas, which follow the inner lives of a cluster of friends as they wrestle with their desires, their ideas, and their histories in the Atlantic coast's city of "Dogtown" on "Cape Gloucester"— the place that is the backbone of this sprawling, eclectic, unconventional, and stimulating fiction by Jonathan Bayliss.
Gloucesterbook 978-0-9625780-1-4 paper $17.95 | 978-0-9831504-0-4 Kindle | 978-0-9831504-1-1 epub
Gloucestertide 978-0-9625780-2-1 paper $17.95 | 978-0-9831504-2-8 Kindle | 978-0-9974641-1-5 epub
Gloucestermas 978-0-9711705-1-3 paper $17.95 | 978-0-9831504-5-9 Kindle & epub
Gilgamesh Plays
Bayliss's dramatic works,The Tower of Gilgamesh and The Acts of Gilgamesh, take place in Sumer (now southern Iraq). It is said that civilization began in Sumer: the first writing, numbering, and accounting systems and the first literature. The two plays are loosely based on the Sumerian Gilgamesh epic. Together they form a comedic tragedy exploring — with humor, imagination, and spirited language — ideas about free will, love, creativity, friendship, and religion.
Gilgamesh Plays 978-0-9831504-3-5 paper $5.95 | 978-0-9831504-4-2 cloth $13.95
978-0-9974641-2-2 Kindle | 978-0-9974641-0-8 epub
MICHAEL CHAPMAN’S APOLOGY TO THE POSSIBLE READER
As a matter of personal integrity, in resistance to the times, and in the interest of efficient information, it was impossible for me to render this transfiction in the demotic language of contemporary American literature. Possible systems of experience, like technology, can best be represented on the page not by reducing or simplifying the complexity of English but by fixing more dimensions of abstraction than commonly intersect as prose. Thus the value of my construction is proportional to the number of right angles at which the unrealized concrescence makes its place.
Robert Burton says “our style bewrays us”:
To dunces, what indeed have we to say?
And yet bar none: bid all and sundry in:
Stranger be doubly welcome, friend or foe!
Democratic Oak Tree
Published posthumously, Democratic Oak Tree is a collection of Jonathan Bayliss's essays and correspondence addressing crucial questions in American politics, including why political parties matter and what Democrats and Republicans really stand for. His essays from 1999 to 2006 are as relevant and compelling today as they were when written. In personal correspondence, he shares hopes and disappointments, from the devastating defeat of of Adlai Stevenson in 1952 to the Democratic contest between Obama and Clinton in 2008. He offers advice to his favorite candidates, promotes their strengths, and defends them publicly when they lose elections.
Democratic Oak Tree 978-0-9831504-8-0 paper $4.95 | 978-0-9831504-9-7 Kindle & epub
Journal
Journal: Passages in a Turbulent Life is an intimate record by Lois Henderson Bayliss (mother of Jonathan Bayliss), written in spurts from 1931 to 1974. As a young woman, she struggles to raise children alone in rundown neighborhoods near Harvard University. In middle age, she writes from the jungles of South America, with vivid descriptions of Primavera, Paraguay, and the Bruderhof commune where she lived during the 1950s. Her pages provide glimpses into pre-World War I Cambridge and Rockport, Massachusetts, the Great Depression, and Boston rooming houses and slums, while conveying the writer’s day-to-day thoughts about love, poverty, child raising, joy, loneliness, and God.
Journal 978-0-9974641-3-9 paper $21.95 | 978-0-9974641-4-6 Kindle & epub