"Confessions of A Crap Artist (1975)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dick Phillip K)

Confessions of a Crap Artist
by
Philip K. Dick

eText version 1.1

________________________________________________________________


Copyright 1975 by Philip K. Dick. All rights reserved.


Cover design & art by Michael Patrick Cronan.


ISBN 0-9601428-2-7

Type set by Michael Labriole; printed in U.S.A.

Hardcover published 1975; limited paperback 1977; this new edition first published June 1978. 5 4 3 2 1

Distributed by Bookpeople, 2940 Seventh St., Berkeley, CA 94710.

Individual copies available @ $3.95 from Entwhistle Books, Box 611, Glen Ellen, CA 95442.

The publishers would like to thank the Special Collections Library at California State University, Fullerton, for help in preparing the manuscript and for providing reference materials used in writing the introduction.


________________________________________________________________


To Tessa,

the dark-haired girl who cared about me
when it mattered most; that is, all the time.

This is to her with love.

________________________________________________________________


Introduction
by
Paul Williams


_Confessions of a Crap Artist_ was written in 1959. It is a _tour de force_, one of the most extraordinary novels I've ever read. There are, I believe, two essential reasons why it has taken Philip K. Dick sixteen years to get this novel published. The first reason is the intensity of the picture the author paints. This is the sort of book that makes editors shiver with (perhaps unconscious) revulsion, and leaves them grasping at any sort of excuse ("I don't like the shifting viewpoint") to reject it and get it out of their minds. The people are too real.
The second reason is that it is a "mainstream" novel written by an author who had already established himself as a fairly successful science fiction writer. It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a science fiction writer to be accepted as a serious novelist when he's not writing science fiction.
Philip K. Dick was born in 1928. He began writing professionally in the early 1950's, and although he steadily submitted short stories and novels to mainstream publishers as well as science fiction markets throughout the 1950's, it was only as a science fiction writer that he was able to get into print. His first short story appeared in _The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction_ in 1952; his first novel, _Solar Lottery_, was published by Ace Books in 1955. Since then, he has had thirty-one other books published in the United States, all of them science fiction.
Despite Dick's considerable popularity--in North America and especially in Europe (where over 100 different editions of his books are in print)--_Confessions of a Crap Artist_ is the first non-science-fiction book by Philip K. Dick that has ever been published. It is one of at least eleven "experimental mainstream novels" (his term) that Dick wrote during the first ten years of his professional career.