Fission Among the Fanatics
3:AM MAGAZINE NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR 2007
Spuyten Duyvil Books (NYC) 2007

Fission Among the Fanatics is about growing up downwind of hydrogen bomb test sites (the sky turned black as midnight during lunchtime at Tom's kindergarten), and receiving writerly vocation among Mormon fundamentalists. Tom ends up pursuing that vocation in exile, among religious nuts of a different stripe, in the most famous nuclear test sites of all: Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It’s a full-circle deal, with an extended stopover of several years in Red China. (He was kicked out for political reasons, detailed in the book.)

Hear Tom read some short excerpts:

Holiday in Hiroshima

Breakfast with Streckfus

Undecorated Dad

Professorial Types

And, the raves are in...

Lemur
Raw Dog Screaming Press (2008)

Damnation and Salvation in the American Food Services Industry!

Spencer Sproul is a would-be serial-killing bus boy who can't manage to murder, injure, or even scare anybody.  It's not for lack of trying.  He sublimates on the job and becomes a star of the family-style restaurant business.

Spencer learns that a restaurant can be an instrument of torture.  If the food, music, decor and waitress uniforms are "ratcheted up" to just the right levels, the place can grate subliminally on people's nerves and stimulate their masochistic tendencies.  Customers come flocking.

The Better Business Bureau takes notice.  But, before Spencer can take his seat of honor at the Merchant of the Month Award Banquet, he must bumble his way past a pederastic restaurant critic, a trash-talking sex worker, a cellulite-worshiping convenience store clerk, and a police force filled with homophobes, overeducated commies and greedy homicide detectives.

Join Tom Bradley in an irresponsible romp through an all-American success story!

"Lemur is one of the flat-out strangest (in a good way) books I've had the pleasure of reading in ages.  Also one of the funniest.  There's very little normalcy to be found in Tom Bradley's demented tale, but more entertainment value than most books twice its length!"
--Jeff Strand, author of Pressure

Read excerpts at Dream People Journal
and nthposition.

Read interviews with Tom about Lemur in Unlikely Stories and Bizarro Central

Killing Bryce
(Infinity Press, 2001)

KILLING BRYCE shows the disintegration of a family of Jack-Mormons who get scattered across two continents like bits of rock salt sprayed from the muzzle of a shotgun.

Listen to the author read from the book

"KILLING BRYCE is ambitious in scope. It is downright epic. The characters are men and women of large talents... Tom Bradley is a writer of truly extravagant gifts...It is remarkable to me that anyone who writes at such length could have an ear as fine as his for the rhythms of prose--but every sentence is considered, balanced and felicitous... I'd be hard pressed to think of any writer who has Bradley's stamina, his range, his learning, his felicity."

-- Stephen Goodwin, author of Blood in Paradise

"Beyond the almost flawless surface of his stylistic facility, I am most impressed by Tom Bradley's ability to walk the edge of a tone that is simultaneously irreverent and profoundly serious. His work derives from the tradition of bawdy and absurdist black comedy of the late sixties, but is not an imitative slave to that tradition. It seems to me that Bradley has learned well from that generation of authors, but has mitigated their example with an even more traditional moral seriousness. It is a delight to be able to laugh aloud when one reads, and it is even more satisfying for a reader to feel confident that there is a significant point to the laughter."

-- Gordon Weaver, author of The Way We Know in Dreams

KILLING BRYCE was a finalist in the AWP Award Series in the Novel, and was nominated for the New York University Bobst Award.

Acting Alone
(Browntrout Publishing, 1995)

ACTING ALONE opens at a cow college in Kansas, proceeds to holiday doings in Kiev, Nebraska, home of a disturbed young Marine recently released by the Revolutionary Guards in Iran, then spirals unpredictably toward Cheyenne Mountain, home of NORAD (the North American Air Defense Command) and the convent of the Servant Sisters of Saint Willibrord of Perpetual Adoration. There a dangerous plot spun by a renegade Mormon threatens to upset the protagonist's plans for material and marital well being.

Listen to the author read from the book

"I found ACTING ALONE to have an incredible energy level."

-- Stanley Elkin,
author of A Bad Man

"The contemporaries of Michelangelo found it useful to employ the term terribilita to characterize some of the expressions of his genius, and I will quote it here to sum up the shocking impact of this novel as a whole. I read it in a state of fascination, admiration, awe, anxiety, and outrage."

R.V. Cassill, 
editor of The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction

Black Class Cur
(Infinity Press, 2001)

Written after two years of living in the People's Republic of China, BLACK CLASS CUR is set in that country on the eve of the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

The main characters are a former Red Guard still trying to fight the Cultural Revolution in a remote rural area, and his younger brother who gets fatally involved in the student demonstrations. They come up against an American "foreign expert" who represents everything they despise, but whose preoccupation is locating a baby to adopt, with or without the help of a variegated gang of third-world medical students.

During his stay in China, Tom Bradley kept his writing secret and avoided becoming reclassified as a journalist, so his movements were largely unrestricted. He traveled to closed cities and met all kinds of people: model citizens as well as derelicts and subversives. He saw a side of this strange place that nobody has reported on yet. As John Updike wrote to him, "Your China experience should stand you in good stead: that vast land is still terra incognita as far as the eye of fiction is concerned."

BLACK CLASS CUR was nominated for the Editor's Book Award.

"A wicked imagination...sheer invention...It soon becomes apparent that Tom Bradley is out to deconstruct, or at least to put a back-breaking spin on almost everything. Nothing is safe...Yet his work is not all grim. Bradley's wit is constantly present, whipping and snapping in strings of one-liners."

-- The Daily Yomiuri

 

Hustling the East
(Xlibris, 2000)

Tom Bradley's Japan novels, featuring that disgruntled expatriate, Sam Edwine, are here collected in a single volume. Hustling the East includes the Abiko Quarterly Award-winning KARA-KUN, and the controversial CURVED JEWELS.

"A merciless humor and tireless passion for words not seen since the King James Bible drive Bradley's work at bullet-train speed through unmapped areas of linguistic elasticity and imagination. Readers once begun will find their concentration hostaged from all other diversions until they reach the last page."

David Wood, author of
  A Definitive Study of Sylvia Plath's Imagery

Kara-Kun, Flip-Kun
(Infinity Press, 1999)

This two-part novel is set in Hiroshima, half a century after the fact.

The title character of KARA-KUN is an ethnic Korean who was in utero at the moment of the atom bomb's detonation. As a result of prenatal exposure to gamma rays, he is tiny and mentally deficient, like many such "bomb babies," but his physical vigor is unimpaired. Living on a makeshift skiff on the river that runs through town, Kara-kun only comes ashore to disrupt high-tone weddings at the cathedral. It's a hobby for him.

Not surprisingly, Kara-kun disappears soon after spoiling a Yakuza wedding. The main part of the narrative shows the efforts of the expatriate community (a very mixed bunch, from all over the first, second and third worlds) to locate him. They send the reluctant and inefficient Sam Edwine to scour Hiroshima for some sign of Kara-kun, whom they've adopted as a mascot.

In FLIP-KUN, Sam Edwine is being stalked through Hiroshima by "hit-missionaries" from a certain well-established American pseudo-religion, whose patriarchs suspect him of being the author of a blasphemous book, and have declared a western-style fatwa on his head.

Listen to the author read from the book

"Tom Bradley gives the reader a dazzling array of characters who are larger-than-life, while tragically and comically very human, and brings the lines of the lives they lead into connection with often explosive and always engaging results...[His] narrative voice vaults across an amazing range to reflect the different voices of the characters...and takes the reader through a technically facile narrative that begins with controlled wildness and a touch of the absurd, and escalates from there...Bradley gives us humor and pathos, antics and consequences, action and reaction, and the possibility of change for the better."

-- Cimarron Review

 

The Curved Jewels
(Infinity Press, 2000)

In THE CURVED JEWELS, the Crown Princess of Japan gets tired of her living-death in the Imperial Palace, and escapes with the help of a couple of shady American expatriates.

The world knows this woman as a brilliant linguist and career diplomat who somehow got coerced into marrying the grandson of Hirohito. The novel shows how that might have happened.

Listen to the author read Chapter 1

"You wanted to write a controversial book, and you have... I doubt you'll ever get it reviewed in Japan."

Donald Richie, The Japan Times

"Tom Bradley's formidable prose evokes the work of two other towering Toms: Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow) and Robbins (Even Cowgirls Get the Blues). Like Pynchon, Bradley possesses a Technicolor imagination and the power to wield language like a stun gun; but he tempers his spiraling narrative with a reasonably linear story-line, and his cynicism with genuine affection for his characters, a la Robbins."

Anthologies

THE EDGIER WATERS: FIVE YEARS OF 3:AM MAGAZINE

"For over five years, 3:AM Magazine has been at the forefront of avant-garde literature, publishing exclusive work by both established authors, poets and critics, and those whose writing is deemed too radical for the mainstream. Now, for the first time in print, Snowbooks is proud to present a selection of this work."

Tom's contribution is a sober meditation on the passing of the Supreme Pontiff, entitled "Slimy Pope."

In the Criminal's Cabinet

The best of Val Stevenson's fabulous nthposition.

"Take up this book, and you'll hear powerful, distinctive voices full of wit, invention and mischief from all over the world, all resonating together by elective affinity in cyberspace. This is the twenty-first century answer to the vanished local bookshop kept by an avid reader with style and taste and real insider knowledge."

--Marina Warner

The Practical Writer
From Inspiration to Publication
Penguin USA (March 2, 2004)

"This is the one book that every writer needs on the journey from the writing studio to publication...filled with valuable information that will help emerging writers make intelligent choices and professional decisions at every stage of their careers...filled with the insights and expertise of authors and other publishing insiders, it covers a range of topics: revising a manuscript, choosing a title, applying for grants, conducting research, evaluating an agent, understanding contracts, working with an editor, finding a literary community, promoting a book, and much more."

Tom's chapter is called "How to Give a Rousing Reading," and tells you, among other things, what to drink, and how much, before your career-making debut.

("Beer's out of the question, as frequent trips to the urinal tend to interrupt the flow of your plot-line.")

The Spirit of Writing
(JP Tarcher, 2001)

"A candid and inspiring anthology exploring the joys and frustrations of being a writer." Contributors include Joan Didion, Sylvia Plath, Henry Miller, Anais Nin, Octavio Paz, John Steinbeck, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Tom Bradley. "These elegant meditations on what it means to be a person who writes offer comfort and inspiration for the countless writers who struggle each day to put words down on paper." Tom's heartwarming bit shows him eating way too much peyote and torching a National Book Award winner's creative writing workshop.

ALL HANDS ON: A THE2NDHAND READER.

This book straddles the line separating the traditional and the new, its pages a mini tug-of-war between beautiful, campfire-style storytelling and high-voltage experimentation. Think like a mountain, draw up the itinerary, live, and try it out!
Read Tom's contribution.