Books, About the Author and Reviews

Novels

Splendora, Viking, Penguin, Hawk Books

Principia Martindale, Harper & Row

A Place with Promise, Doubleday, Hawk Books

The Christopher Park Regulars, British American

Mother of Pearl, British American

Miss Spellbinder's Point of View, Hawk Books

Non Fiction

My Grandfather's Finger, University of Georgia Press

Forthcoming

Dreaming on a Burning Bed

Walking on Glory

The Daughter of the Doctor and the Saint

About the Author

Edward Swift made his debut as a novelist in 1978 with Splendora, which The Houston Chronicle praised as one of the year's best comic novels. He has since written five other acclaimed novels, as well as a memoir, My Grandfather's Finger. He lives in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.

Reviews/Críticas

Splendora

Book Description

Splendora a steamy little East Texas town, is the setting for this rollicking tale of Timothy John Coldridge and Miss Jessie Gatewood, two people who couldn't be any closer. But Timothy John and Miss Jessie are hiding a secret--one that, if discovered, will rock Splendora to its very core.

The Washington Post

Splendora reads like an exuberant fairy tale about a young man's search for himself.

Anne Tyler, The New York Times Book Review

Edward Swift has a particular gift for capturing the continuous low musical murmur of small-town gossip...He knows how stories seem to grow on their own, drifting almost unnoticeably toward the mythical.

People

An intoxicating mixture of wickedness and fun.

The Houston Chronicle

All of the characters are memorable, the situation is refreshingly unique, and Mr. Swift’s style is delightful. Splendora is, to put it simply, splendid.

Miss Spellbinder’s Point of View

A Biography of the Imagination

Book Description

Edward Swift's latest work, is this novel recounting of the remarkable life of Miss Spellbinder--the love child of adventurer Lord Andrew Spellbinder and the tempestuous Spanish coloratura, Amelita de la Luna. Miss Spellbinder shares her voyeuristic adventures and remarkable journey. This book is unlike anything you have ever read before.

The Boston Globe – Richard Dyer

Much of Miss Spellbinder’s Point of View is witty; some of it is gorgeous; some of it is disturbing; some of it is simply exhausting in its ingenuity. Over all it is like cotton candy spun of glass - glistening, insubstantial, and a deadly weapon.

A Place With Promise

From Publishers Weekly

Elizabeth Treadway was standing in the Sabine River, her three pet cranes nearby, when Isaac Overstreet came down from Camp Ruby in search of a wife. She didn't even wave goodbye to her sisters when she climbed in Isaac's boat and told him he'd found what he'd been looking for. Settling in to Camp Ruby, something less than a bona fide town in turn-of-the-century East Texas, Bessie Overstreet makes a home of Isaac's ramshackle house, establishes herself with the townspeople, and begins her life-long effort to hybridize a purple daylily. Soon their twin daughters, the Ruby-Jewels, are born, and some years later another girl, ever-cranky Zeda Earl. The people of Camp Ruby accept life's mysteries and each others' eccentricities as comfortably as they live on the shifting shore of the Sabine. The twins leave home to live with the teacher's son high in an abandoned water tower, where they patch prize-winning crazy quilts; Isaac fishes on the Sabine with a clumsy angel; the deranged Billy Wiggins brings satisfaction to the doctor's insatiable daughter. While neither their superstitions nor wisdom can withstand the inroads of progress, something of their quirky grit lasts. In the end, it's the least likely Zeda Earl in whom the spirit of the time and place is carried on. Swift exhibits plenty of his own wisdom and imagination in this novel, following Splendora and Principia Martindale.

From Library Journal

Camp Ruby, in the Sabine River backwoods of east Texas, seems always slightly off center to the discerning eye, and the people who live there accommodate and enhance that view with their own eccentricities based on a heritage of poverty, mysticism, superstition, and naivete. Zeda Earl Overstreet, a minor character in Swift's earlier novel Splendora, becomes a focus of this turn-of-the-century novel as she struggles from birth to escape from Camp Ruby and find her place in life, to return years later to contentment that only exists at home. Zeda Earl's story blends with the lives of her mother, sisters, neighbors, and friends, all of whom contribute to the intricate tapestry that is the town. Written in a grand style reminiscent of legend, this offbeat novel will appeal to a select audience.

The Boston Globe

A Place with Promise has the surprising timeless particularity and inevitability of fable, and the clear-running stream of Swift's prose...

Carolyn See, Los Angeles Times

A Place with Promise is a dignified, stately, intelligent book–everything a novel should be.

Kirkus Review of Books

A sweet-spirited East Texas Zen tale, rich with humor and frontier wisdom.

Kirkus Review of Books

A sweet-spirited East Texas Zen tale, rich with humor and frontier wisdom.

Book Description

A Place with Promise is a magical, generation-spanning fable about everything we think we've lost-except, as the denizens of Camp Ruby learn, it's all still there, if we only know where to look for it.

My Grandfather’s Finger

Booklist

Novelist (of Mother of Pearl and Splendora) and visual artist Swift details his post^-World War II childhood in this amusing and somewhat poignant memoir. Born and raised in the Big Thicket, an isolated rural hamlet in East Texas, Swift recalls the joys and curiosities of his simple childhood, using brief anecdotes and plenty of photographs of his relations and many of the town's other colorful characters. From neighbors dwelling in bomb shelters to an island inhabited by albinos, and from atomic bombs to carnivals and amputated fingers kept in jars, Swift's portrayal of his childhood is not the usual nostalgic treatment. Instead, there is a darkness lurking about the edges of this town and about the edges of these stories, which lends strength to the author's memories and contributes to the success of this collection. Texas libraries may be especially interested in the work of this native son.

From Kirkus Reviews

A loving and often hilarious recollection of the authors family and other denizens of East Texas Big Thicket region. Certain writers Joseph Mitchell, Armistead Maupin, and Eudora Welty, to name just a few have absorbed the essence of the region they write about so thoroughly that the settings themselves, as described by those authors, are just as crucial to a readers enjoyment as the plots and characters they surround. Swift (Mother of Pearl, 1990, etc.) has the good fortune to have grown up in a region whose very name the Big Thicket promises a rollicking tale or two, and he doesn’t disappoint. Now a national biological preserve, this area of East Texas was still wild enough during the authors youth in the 1940s and '50s that the eccentricity of its inhabitants was derived as much from their environment as their personalities. The author freely admits that ``not only did [his family and friends from that time] live their lives as if they were characters springing from the pages of a book, they were front porch storytellers of the highest order.'' Swift has inherited this storytelling gene, and the material that his family has provided is so bizarre that it frequently straddles the line between memoir and tall tale, the title episode, which involves an unusual pickling, being a case in point. Happily, the author manages to avoid the sentimentality of some other recent memoirs; though he shows great affection for his childhood friends and family, he harbors no illusions about them. Especially resonant are Swifts portraits of the women of his family, particularly his mother, who was widowed in WWII and became the anchor of his extended family. He provides a funny, mournful depiction of her as a woman who ``was about transcending sadness with laughter.'' The mythic South at its most entertaining.

Principia Martindale

The Boston Globe – Richard Dyer

Edward Swift has a sharp eye, a sharper ear and moral sense. In his new book (Principia Martindale) he leaves Firbank far behind – not without a nostalgic glance at

Splendora – and rises to the savae indignatios, the savage indignation of another Swift, surely a distant relative, Jonathan by name.

Kirkus Review of Books

Magically textured with an un-intrusive network of symbols, yet ripe and angry too: a funny/sad, acidulous scrutiny of folks whose arms are too short to box God in…

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