SELECTED REVIEWS OF
Lemur

Bless the loving hearts of our brothers and sisters in the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender community. They love Lemur.

The Advocate is the mightiest, most legit and widely read LGBT magazine in the world. People like Barack and Hillary line up to curry their favor. Hillary was clearly jazzed to be on the cover of a recent issue.

Here's their review of Lemur. Evidently Tom has awakened a fresh archetype in the collectively gay unconscious, and created a new character to grace the pages of Queer Lit.

Read Rain Taxi's Lemur rave.

SELECTED REVIEWS OF
Fission Among the Fanatics

Tom Bradley is one of the most criminally underrated
authors on the planet.            
--Andrew Gallix, 3 am magazine

This Bradley would make Lafcadio Hearn reel with
laughter ... if not shake his head in wonder.  
--Lolita Lark, Ralph

I love the contradictions in Bradley's work: the subtlety beneath the rollicking humour; the precision, in his more political work, underlying the scathing tone; and the simplicity of his language throughout.
--Val Stevenson, nthposition

"With a knack for combining colorful argot with a learned style full of historical and philosophical references, he weaves it all into scenes of low buffoonery and deep subtext. What results is a bizarre point of view, full of odd insights...There's plenty in Tom Bradley's writings to offend just about everyone. It takes a twisted sense of humor to appreciate this lunatic scholar, degenerate Harold Bloom, and biblical madman. Whether you think he goes too far depends on how many taboos are packed in your baggage. But although he criticizes and satirizes without surcease, he professes no superiority of any one thing over another, except for the classic faculties of observation and reason. In the end, his values are solidly humanitarian..."
--Read John-Ivan Palmer's review of Fission Among the Fanatics in London's nthposition Magazine.

Fission Among the Fanatics comes fully equipped with a critical appendix by Cye Johan--

"This is a book-length tour-de-force essay on Tom Bradley and The Sam Edwine Pentateuch.  This may be the longest piece ever published in the Cybercorpse, and the first appearance of a genre so strange we are turning away from naming it..."
--Andrei Codrescu

Tom Bradley and the Sam Edwine Pentateuch
Author Profile-Interview in Andre Codrescu's astonishing Exquisite Corpse. I tell you that Dr. Bradley has devoted his existence to writing because he intends for every center of consciousness, everywhere, in all planes and conditions (not just terrestrial female Homo sapiens in breeding prime) to love him, forever, starting as soon as possible, though he's prepared to wait thousands of centuries after he's dead.

SELECTED REVIEWS OF
The Curved Jewels

Apparently, Tom suffers from a Christ complex. Find out about it in the legendary Exquisite Corpse (featured in the Webby Award- winning Arts and Letters Daily).

SELECTED REVIEWS OF
Acting Alone

R.V. Cassill, editor of The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, and author of The Castration of Harry Bluethorn
The hallmark of this astonishing work is excess. Excess of complications in the story, excess of violence both physical and moral, excess of arabesque digressions, excess of scope (the author broadens his lines to encompass whole realms of religious, sexual, political, generational, and occupational routines and aberrations), excess of judgmental fury often expressed in terms of indignant satire, and, finally, an excess of verbal brilliance proceeding from a mind densely loaded with literary and topical instances.

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.

Acting Alone must be grappled with on its own reckless terms. And I must say that if I cannot help supposing it to be a work of genius, I do not find it by any means altogether amiable. I would say the same of the central character Sam Edwine as of the whole work, which displays the furious excesses and contradictions of his inward nature, projected on the world he inhabits with gargantuan passion.

Sam is, among other things, a writer who scorns and abjectly courts popular acceptance, an almost asexual lover whose passions flicker like the lightning in a Frankenstein movie, a luciferian meddler in the banal and cosmic realms of megapolitics and religion.

The secondary characters (including the Elder Cicerone, whose true identity may be that of a supernatural authority) are drawn with the same excessive verve to be noted in Edwine. Among them I found most satisfying Sam's girl Shannon and her stegosaurian cousin, the ex Marine who was a hostage in Iran. Out of their tangled relations alone a wonderful comic shocker could be fashioned. And some part of my mind wishes that this potent fragment could be untangled from the whole to stand alone.

But I will (as I must) take such things to be only parts of the vast maelstrom spun from an imagination of superlative dimensions. While I entertain some conservative and/or humanistic wishes that the force majeure of this imagination could be, in a sense, domesticated, I am obliged to suppress those wishes in admiration for an unbridled titanism.


Dr. Dalma Brunauer, The Journal of Evolutionary Psychology
What a rich book this is! First, it is a self-portrait of Gargantua himself: what it is like to be almost seven feet tall and striding through the world with the appetites and aspirations of such a giant. Second, it is a bildungsroman: an account of the hard knocks Gargantua/Sam Edwine suffers through in his search for fame and fortune/the meaning of life/integrity. A hard task, to reconcile these incongruous objectives, but then he is only twenty-six, and at that age one tends to think of oneself as invincible. He soon learns--the hard way--that he is not invincible; in fact, he is quite vulnerable.

The forces he is up against are formidable. Tom Bradley is a master of the intricate plot: he manages to weave together strands as seemingly unrelated as the Iranian hostage crisis, NORAD, expatriate Jews from Belarus, a German-founded order of nuns of perpetual adoration, and an unnamed but easily recognizable cult with sinister plots and a megalomaniacal mastermind. It is full of satire on a multitude of targets from academia to the publishing racket, to Nancy Reagan. This aspect of the novel makes reading it the most fun since Tom Jones.

In trying to characterize Tom Bradley's use of the English language a number of metaphors come to mind: fireworks. . .erupting geysers. . .but, sadly, also, erupting sewers. In fact the only objection this reviewer has for the book is what seems an unnecessary abundance of filth, both scatological and eschatological. In other words, it uses obscenities and blasphemous expressions to a degree which seems excessive. In this, too, of course, it fits the pattern established by Rabelais in his masterworks Gargantua and Pantagruel. (As well as much of contemporary fiction.)

Tom Bradley has promised to carry Sam Edwine through further stages of his adventures/ aspirations/ crises and perhaps victories. One awaits with great interest to see whether he will succeed in taming him and putting his hero's--and his own--amazing energies into contexts more, shall we say, domesticated. Now that Sam is married, he is no longer "acting alone." (How well we remember that phrase.)

On top of all its other fascinations, Acting Alone is also a love story. And following the course of that amazing plot line leads to a truly tender and glorious conclusion, almost a hierogamy. In characterizing his heroine, Tom Bradley accomplished what Dante promised his beloved Beatrice: to write of her what has never been written of another woman.


John Christakos, Mainichi Daily News
A Spectacle in the Tradition of the Towering Toms"
Meet Sam Edwine, legend in his own mind. The anti-hero of Tom Bradley's dazzling, disturbing first novel, Acting Alone, desperately wants to see himself as a brilliant wordsmith, a buffed surf-god, a sex magnet, one of the last great humanists on the cusp of the Reagan reign.

The rest of the world, however, sees Sam as a petty, sweaty, unpublished poet-cum-comp instructor at an agricultural college in Kanorado (the flats of west Kansas and east Colorado).

In between feverish delusions of greatness, Sam despairs of ever attaining the fame and wealth he craves until he hits upon a lucrative form of literary prostitution: ghost writing the memoirs of one of the "new American saints"--the freshly released Marines who were held hostage in Iran.

The protagonist of Acting Alone has good reason to agonize about his literary stature; the author has nothing to worry about.

Bradley's formidable prose evokes the work of two 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 storyline, and his cynicism with genuine affection for his characters, a la Robbins.

The other earnest misfits in Sam's world are just as intriguing: There's Axelrad, the fervent neo-Marxist and Sam's circle-jerk buddy from prep school; Sam's student, Shannon, a flirty, flighty co-ed whose favorite expression of strong dislike is "for ick!"; and Shannon's sister, the sister -Sister Polycarpana, that is, the sensual malcontent nun of the Servant Sisters if Saint Willibrord of Perpetual Adoration.

Sam's quest eventually takes the crew to the nun's Cheyenne Mountain order, nestled in the shadow of NORAD (the North American Air Defense Command) where Sam is confronted with a Mormon megalomaniac.

The promo sheet for Acting Alone includes gushing kudos from literary heavyweights Stanley Elkin, Gordon Weaver and R.V. Cassill. Cassill expresses one reservation, however, and it is worth noting. Cassill writes, "...I entertain some conservative and/or humanistic wishes that the force majeure of [Bradley's] imagination could be, in a sense, domesticated...."

Domesticated it is not. The cynicism in the book is deep and uncompromising. Bradley takes direct aim at the government, academia and a host of religions. Where you stand on the sacredness of these institutions will determine where you stand on Tom Bradley. Readers who are able to set their preconceptions aside and judge the spectacle on its own terms, however, will not be disappointed.


Jubal Tiner, The Cimarron Review
Most of us like to think that when we act, we act alone, in heroic fashion, single-handedly forging and ordering the path we carve through the world. However, we must realize that no act is ever engendered alone; instead, each action is in reaction to the movements and actions of others, either through collusion or coincidence, creating a web of crisscrossing actions and reactions which links all, obscuring the origin of each, so that no one can truly "act alone."

It is such a web of colliding actions Tom Bradley weaves in his ambitious and energetic first novel Acting Alone. Throughout the spinning miasma of his prose, Bradley sets his story in several disparate locales, gives the reader a dazzling array of characters who are at once 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.

Envision Sam Edwine, a seven-and-a-half-foot tall graduate student and teaching assistant at Kanorado State College (a "cow college" somewhere in the rolling empty expanse of eastern Colorado and western Kansas), who has a penchant for canceling his classes, dating his students, and skipping off to parts unknown in search of get-rich-quick writing projects, where the stories of "real-life" heroes are ghostwritten into "larger-than-life" books which line the grocery store checkout lanes of America, and deliver grossly fantastic sums of money into the pockets of said ghostwriters. Give Sam an altercation with a bar bouncer, a chronically bloody nose (reinjured in other incidents and accidents throughout the narrative), and a student girlfriend, whose uncle, Spikewell J. Wamsutter, happens to be a surviving, bristle-necked, bigoted, red-blooded, homophobic, John-Wayne Rambo-type hostage just returned from war-torn Iran, and holed up in Kiev, Nebraska, waiting to be propositioned by a ghostwriter--preferably one who is about to be "in the family."

Into the mix introduce the St. Paphnutius convent, located in Colorado Springs, complete with nuns of all sizes, shapes, orders, and disorders (including the nun Polycarpana, who is Sam's student-girlfriend's older sister) devoted to living in the humblest and poverty-stricken devotion to Christ. They use X-ray film ("donated by one of our community's many fine hospitals") for napkin rings, guard first editions of Edgar Allan Poe's tales of the unimaginable; and keep tabs on a mysterious intruder which appears regularly in the dark and conventional dungeon-like corridors of the convent.

The intruder, however, happens to be Sam Edwine's best "little-buddy from-way-back," Axelrad, who is camping out near the convent, surrounded by what he believes are robots (which are really the most religiously devout obeying their strict orders to act like robots), working on field research for his anthropological thesis. He is being funded not only by scholarships from the anthropology department of his university, but also by the villain of the novel, Elder Cicerone, who has plans to firebomb the convent from his self-appointed throne above the Springs, exploit Sam's ghostwriting skills to write a "psychosexual biography" (ultimately autobiography) that is "leering and cheap enough to feed America's voyeurism, and to titillate the national glee at having debased, absorbed, and nullified the left-wing radicalism of the sixties."

The actions set in motion from such a backdrop are carried successfully by a narrative voice which vaults across an amazing range to reflect the different voices of the characters. This reflective narrative persona propels the reader effectively from the mental and language pop-culture antics of Sam Edwine--

"They'd all gone indoors to drink Lipton Instant and watch Oral Roberts, Sam cocksure that he'd landed himself a most lucrative deal and feeling highly excited and, as usual, verbal. Fatally verbal. And, by pure chance, there'd been a series of commercials featuring large-mouthed, skinny, husky-voiced women, all leering knowingly out of the box straight at Sam as he sat on the couch trying not to tip over Mae Bell Wamsutter's coffee table with his knees."

--to the spirituality and graciousness of Sister Polycarpana:

"Polly listened inwardly to the tone of her mind's voice as she explained away the ghastly stench in this sanguine manner; she heard the same strident and heavily rhetorical tones that her larynx took on when arguing some political point, of whose validity she was not absolutely convinced, deep inside."

Through such a wide and flexible narrative persona, Bradley is able to take his reader from the heights of the crazed ravings of Sam Edwine being coerced by Cicerone to pen the "psychosexual biography," to the depth of the naivete, pity, and misplaced patriotism of Spikey Wamsutter when he and a group of gung ho, gun-toting Nebraskans destroy a small town near Kiev and commit any number of murders in the name of eradicating socialism in the riveting and heart-wrenching thirteenth chapter.

In addition to taking the reader through a technically facile narrative that begins with a controlled wildness with a touch of the absurd and escalates from there, Bradley also manages to give his readers the coming-of-age story of his protagonist, Sam Edwine, wrapped up in a social critique of the times.

Embodied in each character is some aspect of American society, whether it is the use-the-system-to-get-rich-quick schemes of Sam, or the bravado and bullishness brought about by ignorance shown in Spikey, or the abuse of power seen in Cicerone, or the honesty and willingness to find truth for one's self and act on it to bring positive change illustrated in the spirituality of Sister Polycarpana. Each character represents not only a part of what comprises America today, but also describes a possible path for our actions as both Americans and humans.

In the often comic and ironically heroic coming-of-age story of Sam Edwine, Bradley gives his readers humor and pathos, antics and consequences, action and reaction, and the possibility of change for the better, as Sam realizes what we all hopefully realize in the end--that we are "not in it alone."