Description

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A revolutionary comic masterpiece, an icon of literature as American pop art, and a book unlike any other, The Adventures of Mao on the Long March breaks all frames.

An icon of literature as American Pop Art, Frederic Tuten’s Adventures of Mao on the Long March is a triumphantly witty and subversive novel. The New York Times called it “almost too good to be true.” Tuten’s deadpan textbook narrative of Mao’s Long March is peppered with loving parodies of Hemingway, Kerouac, Dos Passos, and Malamud. As John Updike comments, the book includes “twenty-seven pages of straight history of the Long March (October 1934-October 1935), done in a neutral, factual tone, as by a fellow-traveling Readers Digest…thirty-six and a half pages of quotations in quotation marks…and twenty-six pages of what might be considered normal novelistic substance—imaginary encounters and conversation. For an example: ‘a tank, covered with peonies and laurels, advances towards him. Mao thinks the tank will crush him, but it clanks to a halt. The turret rises, hesitantly. Greta Garbo, dressed in red sealskin boots, red railway-man’s cap, and red satin coveralls, emerges. She speaks: “Mao, I have been bad in Moscow and wicked in Paris, I have been loved in every capital, but I have never seen a MAN whom I could love. That Man is you, Mao, Mao mine.” Mao considers this dialectically. The woman is clearly mad. Yet she is beautiful and the tank seems to work.‘”

About the Author

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Frederic Tuten is the author of Tintin in the New World, The Green Hour, and Self Portraits, among other fiction. He has received a Guggenheim fellowship and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Distinguished Writing. He lives in New York City.

Praise For…

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The Adventures of Mao on the Long March provides an intelligent, taut, and entertaining change from conventional novels. Its substance is satisfyingly solid and satisfyingly mysterious. 

— John Updike - The New Yorker

Delightful and original—funny and bitter and serious.
— Iris Murdoch

A work of genius and by far the best ‘post-modernist’ novel…Mao stands alone as a masterpiece of its kind.

— Oscar Hijuelos

Frederic Tuten has written a violently hilarious book. The Adventures of Mao is soda pop, a cold towel, a shady spot under a tree for culture-clogged foot soldiers on the American long march.

— Susan Sontag