Picador Books – Part 7 – Anna Kavan, Ken Kesey, Maxine Hong Kingston, J K Klavans & Richard Klein

Anna Kavan’s novels were rediscovered in the 1970s and Picador published at least two of them, Ice and Sleep Has His House.

Reading her biography on Wikipedia and the website dedicated to her, she sounds like she was a very strange lady.

The Picador editions below have wonderful cover art by Paul Delvaux. I also have copy of her novel Julia and the Bazooka in a 1974 Panther paperback edition.

Ken Kesey was well known as one of the Merry Pranksters, the antics of whom are described in Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

Anyway Kesey very much appealed to the counter culture of the 1960s and 70s. Below is the Picador edition of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.

The Woman Warrior and China Men are memoirs by Maxine Hong Kingston of growing up in a Chinese American family. It is many years since I’ve read these books, but I recall being enthralled by them at the time. Note to self – read them again soon.

I don’t know much about J K Klavans but I do have her novel God He Was Good in a Picador edition. I remember looking for this book everywhere and finally stumbling across it in a second hand bookshop. Quite frankly, I don’t think it was worth the effort. Anyway, the cover is interesting.

And lastly, for this entry anyway, Cigarettes Are Sublime by Richard Klein, a defence, and cultural history of cigarette smoking. The Picador edition has a very classy cover.

More Picadors to follow…