Harvey Jacobs
One day at a TV company I met a person called Harvey Jacobs, who not only happened to
be a script writer for the show but also someone who I had read
over the years. Harvey Jacobs!
Harvey's writing is hard to characterize except that it has a
knife to it - a friendly, humorous, and humanistic knife but a knife nonetheless.
In person, however, he is quite affably and knows how to tell,
as well as how to write, a good story.
But there he was in the same building, on the same floor, very
very close by. He began publishing fiction in the late fifties
and the sixties when originality was prized, unlike the present
times which are becoming more and more conservative and bleak. Anyway, his first book was a collection of short stories (The Egg of the Glak) and then came a short but funny sequence of novels, including The Juror, which is at least optioned to become a movie.
One of the happier times for me was being able to design and produce
camera copy for his novel, Beautiful
Soup, for Celadon Press. . . . Yes, computers have helped
turned everything topsy-turvy, and you can check out the first chapter of Beautiful Soup within these pages as well as read a few excerpts of the excellent reviews the book has achieved.
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Significant Publications
- The Egg of the Glak and Other Stories, Harper & Row, 1969.
- Summer on a Mountain of Spices, Harper & Row, 1975.
- The Juror, Franklin Watts, 1980.
- Beautiful Soup, Celadon Press, 1994.
- American Goliath, St. Martins Press, 1997.
- My Rose and My Glove: Stories (Real and Surreal), Darkside Press, 2005.
My Rose and My Glove is a remarkable collection of 24 stories. A limited and numbered edition, it features a couple of new stories as well as reprints. The book is the opportunity to have on hand one of the most remarkable ranges of short stories, and I recommend it highly. Well, I wish the print were larger, but what the heck. Once absorbed in one of Harvey's stories, a reader forgets such aspects for the sheer joy of the read.