 Cover of 1961 first edition published by McGraw-Hill | |
| Author | Richard Condon |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Fiction |
| Published | July 18, 1961 [1] |
| Publisher | McGraw-Hill |
| Media type | |
A Talent for Loving; or The Great Cowboy Race was the fourth novel by Richard Condon. Published in 1961, it was one of the books that inspired a brief cult for his strenuously off-beat works. A subtitle does not appear on the cover of its first edition but is shown on an inner page.
In the 16th century an Aztec priest has cut off his own hand and used the bloody stump to lay a curse upon a blasphemous Spanish conquistador and all his direct descendants. The curse: that once any of the descendants, whether male or female, have tasted physical love, even in the form of a single kiss, they will spend the rest of their lives as being nearly sexually insatiable. Three centuries later the beautiful young virginal daughter of a fabulously wealthy Texas rancher and gambler is its latest victim. An elaborate set of contests and races is arranged to choose which of two cowboys will win her hand in marriage.
The reception was mixed. Time magazine said:
Disciples are the undoing of holy men, and so it is with Richard Condon, a talented and satirical fantast whose fiercely proselytizing followers regard him as the fifth hoarse man of the Apocalypse. A Condon novel has the sound and shape of a bagful of cats.... But Condon's latest morality, a Western, is written with calculation, not exasperation. It is not hard to imagine the author fretfully asking himself, on a dry day, what would be a good, juicy Condon touch.... Proof that the author himself knows that something is wrong is that on almost every page he stops to wave at friends in the crowd. A street in Paris, for instance, is not too slyly titled "Rue Artbuch Wald." [2]
The New York Times was more favorable:
One could go on about Richard Condon's surrealist story lines, his laugh-out-loud satiric wit, and his inordinate ability to invent outlandish detail. But the key to reading the author... correctly is to see him as a sophistocated Hans Christian Andersen, a teller of sardonic fairy tales for adults.... Along the way in his new novel, which is the Western to end them all, Condon follows his bent of inserting a measure of social commentary into his neatly laced phrases. Thus: "Never among the savage peoples of history, excepting the white man, has there been equal to the ferocity, the intelligence and the wanton destructiveness of the Apache Indians." But Condon's main aim is still to fascinate, surprise, entertain. And the reader is successfully dazzled into a page-turning trance, like a book-struck child.... Since this is a novel by Richard Condon, it all ends with brilliantly eccentric symmetry as a war party of savage Injuns dash out to rescue the whites from a massacre by the cavalry. [3]
The title, as is the case in six of Condon's first seven books, is derived from the first line of a typical bit of Condonian doggerel that supposedly comes from a fictitious Keener's Manual mentioned in many of his earlier novels:
The verse is found as an epigraph on a blank page five pages after the title page and four pages before the beginning of the text. [4]
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Richard Thomas Condon was an American political novelist. Though his works were satire, they were generally transformed into thrillers or semi-thrillers in other media, such as cinema. All 26 books were written in distinctive Condon style, which combined a fast pace, outrage, and frequent humor while focusing almost obsessively on monetary greed and political corruption. Condon himself once said: "Every book I've ever written has been about abuse of power. I feel very strongly about that. I'd like people to know how deeply their politicians wrong them." Condon's books were occasionally bestsellers, and a number of his books were made into films; he is primarily remembered for his 1959 The Manchurian Candidate and, many years later, a series of four novels about a family of New York gangsters named Prizzi.
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The Manchurian Candidate is a novel by Richard Condon, first published in 1959. It is a political thriller about the son of a prominent U.S. political family who is brainwashed into being an unwitting assassin for a Communist conspiracy.
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The Keener's Manual is an imaginary book created by the 20th-century American political novelist Richard Condon. From it Condon used quotations or epigraphs, generally in verse, to either illustrate the theme of his novels, or, in a large number of cases, as the source of the title, in particular six of his first seven books: The Oldest Confession, Some Angry Angel, A Talent for Loving, An Infinity of Mirrors, and Any God Will Do. Only his second, and most famous novel, The Manchurian Candidate, derived its title elsewhere. A number of his later books also reference it for epigraphs, without, however, using any of its verse as a source for titles.
The Oldest Confession is a 1958 novel, the first of twenty-five by the American political novelist and satirist Richard Condon. It was published by Appleton-Century-Crofts. The novel is a tragicomedy about the attempted theft of a masterpiece from a museum in Spain. It can be classified as a caper story or caper novel, a subset of crime novels. The book deals with issues of money, greed, ethics and morality. It was adapted into a film retitled The Happy Thieves.
A Talent for Loving is a 1969 British-American comedy Western film directed by Richard Quine and starring Richard Widmark, Chaim Topol, and Cesar Romero. It is based on the 1961 parodic Western novel A Talent for Loving, or The Great Cowboy Race by Richard Condon, who also wrote the screenplay. The home video version of the film is re-titled Gun Crazy and has been edited to 95 minutes.
Mile High was the eighth book by the American satirist and political novelist Richard Condon, first published by Dial Press in 1969. Internationally famous at the time of its publication, primarily because of his 1959 Manchurian Candidate, Condon had begun to lose the respect of critics with the publication of his last few books and the one-time, so-called Condon Cult was mostly a thing of the past. Like his fifth book, An Infinity of Mirrors, Mile High is a consciously ambitious work, primarily concerned with the establishment of Prohibition in the United States, and Condon researched it thoroughly. The first two-thirds of the book, in fact, reads as much like a lively history of New York City gangsterism from the mid-18th century through 1930 as it does a novel.
An Infinity of Mirrors was the fifth and most ambitious book by the American satirist and political novelist Richard Condon. First published by Random House in 1964, it is set in France and Germany of the 1930s and 1940s, as seen through the eyes of a beautiful, rich Parisian Jew and her beloved husband, an old-fashioned Prussian army general. What unfolds is and an almost unrelievedly bleak depiction of the rise of the Nazis and the Third Reich.
Any God Will Do is the sixth book by the American satirist and political novelist Richard Condon, first published by Random House in 1966. After the almost unmitigated grimness of his previous book, An Infinity of Mirrors, it was a return to his more usual light-heartedness as displayed in works such A Talent for Loving. Although its theme is madness, unusually for Condon it has little of the almost gratuitous scenes of violence and sudden deaths that punctuate most of his books. The only notable instance is that of a haughty French sommelier who shoots himself at an aristocratic dinner party when he discovers that an American guest is indeed correct in asserting a great white Burgundy can accompany young spring lamb.
The Ecstasy Business was the seventh book by the American satirist and political novelist Richard Condon, first published by The Dial Press in 1967. Told in the third person, it is the broadly comic story of Tynan Bryson, "the greatest film star of his generation", and his torturous relationship with the director Albert McCobb, a blatant caricature of Alfred Hitchcock, and with his tempestuous ex-wife, an Italian film star to whom he has been married three times.
The Sellout is a 2015 novel by Paul Beatty published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and in the UK by Oneworld Publications in 2016. The novel takes place in and around Los Angeles, California, and muses about the state of racial relations in the U.S. today. In October 2016, it won the Booker Prize, making Beatty the first US writer to win that award.
Prizzi's Honor is a satirical crime novel by Richard Condon published in 1982. It is the first of four novels featuring the Prizzis, a powerful family of Mafiosi in New York City. In all four novels the protagonist is a top member of the family named Charlie Partanna. It was adapted into a successful film of the same name.
Prizzi's Family is a satirical, semi-humorous crime novel by Richard Condon published in 1986. It is the second of four novels featuring the Prizzis, a powerful family of Mafiosi in New York City. In all four novels the main protagonist is a top member of the family named Charley Partanna. It is a prequel to the very successful Prizzi's Honor of 1982, which was also adapted into an award-winning film.
Prizzi's Glory is a satirical, semi-humorous crime novel by Richard Condon published in 1988. It is the third of four novels featuring the Prizzis, a powerful family of Mafiosi in New York City. In all four novels the main protagonist is a top member of the family named Charlie Partanna. The book's events begin in 1986 and continue through the Presidential election of 1992.
Prizzi's Money is a satirical, semi-humorous crime novel by Richard Condon published in 1994. It is the last of four novels featuring the Prizzis, a powerful family of Mafiosi in New York City. It was also the last of 28 books that Condon wrote over a 36-year career. In all four Prizzi novels the main protagonist is a top member of the family named Charley Partanna. In this book, however, which takes place about six or seven years after the events of the first novel, Prizzi's Honor, and at least a decade before those of the third book, Prizzi's Glory, Charley's role is less important than in the three others; although he makes brief appearances in the first half of the book, it is not until the second half that he becomes one of the primary characters.
This article incorporates material from the Citizendium article "A Talent for Loving", which is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License but not under the GFDL.