"Tom Bradley is one of the most exasperating, offensive, pleasurable, and brilliant writers I know. I recommend his work to anyone with spiritual fortitude and a taste for something so strange that it might well be genius."
-- Denis Dutton, Arts & Letters Daily

"A literary giant among pygmies."
-- 3:AM Magazine

When Tom Bradley was a little boy he was given a gazetteer for Christmas. As little boys will, he looked up all the places in the world that start with the F-word. There were two, Fukien in China and Fukuoka in Japan. Little did he suspect that he would one day be exiled to both.

Tom is a former lounge harpist. During his pre-exilic period, he played his own transcriptions of Bach and Debussy in a Salt Lake City synagogue that had been transformed into a pricey watering hole by a nephew of the Shah of Iran.

He taught British and American literature to Chinese graduate students in the years leading up to the Tiananmen Square massacre. He was politely invited to leave China after burning a batch of student essays about the democracy movement rather than surrendering them to "the leaders."

He wound up teaching conversational skills to freshman dentistry majors in the Japanese "imperial university" where they used to vivisect our bomber pilots and serve their livers raw at festive banquets. But his writing somehow sustains him.

To date, Tom has written five novels tracing the not-quite-career of a seedy member of the lumpen-intelligentsia named Sam Edwine. If he didn't think it might be offensive, Tom would call this corpus The Sam Edwine Pentateuch. The first novel in the series, Killing Bryce, examines the disintegration of the Edwines, a family of gigantic Jack-Mormons. In Acting Alone Sam tries to get hired as ghost-writer for a recently released hostage of Islamic fundamentalists. Black Class Cur finds Sam in China in the halcyon days just before the student democracy movement gave the Party the excuse it needed to slam a lid on everything. Kara-kun/Flip-kun can be read as a portrait of contemporary Hiroshima, where Sam brings the expatriate community face-to-face with the Japanese Mafia. The Curved Jewels shows the Crown Princess of Japan experiencing understandable second thoughts about being wed to the grandson of Hirohito, and fleeing the imperial palace with Sam's help.

Various of these novels have been nominated for The Editor's Book Award and The New York University Bobst Prize, and one was a finalist in The AWP Award Series in the Novel. Tom's short stories have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes.  One or two were translated into Japanese, or so he's been told. His essays appear in Salon.com, Gadfly and Exquisite Corpse, and are frequently featured in the Webby Award-winning Arts and Letters Daily.