Sporting with Amaryllis

A tight, clean, and unmarked copy." Paul West is one of our most acclaimed writers, author of such novels as Rat Man of Paris and Lord Byron's Doctor. This time out, he astounds us with a novel on the nature of creative genius and its nexus with sexuality, a novel at turns erotic, lewd, philosophical mythical, and spiritual. Review: Readers familiar with the definitive imaginative work on original sin written by the stern, blind 17th-century poet John Milton may be shocked by Paul West's younger version of the man. In Sporting with Amaryllis, West describes a youthful Milton bursting at the seams with sexual curiosity and panting to experience his own personal fall from grace. At turns elegant, vulgar, spiritual, and erotic, this lyrical imagining of Milton's early life presents a mesmerizing portrait of the poet as a young man." Paul West, the author of 16 previous novels, writes in language so vivid and so precise that the streets of 17th-century London leap off the page in all their smelly, filthy ambiance. Even the young Milton is a collection of smells, tastes, and textures over which a thick patina of fevered genius is laid. And Amaryllis herself--prostitute, first love, poetic muse--is more than what she seems, a fact that gives this slim volume an unexpected twist at the end.