Blindfolded Before the Firing Squad, or The Brothers Kirkmaus

A LITERARY TREAT from start to finish. Blindfolded Before the Firing Squad or The Brothers Kirkmaus bares the lives of the brothers Fyodor and Rogo Kirkmaus, long time reviewers for Kirkus, the book review journal read throughout the English-speaking world. Rogo and Fyodor write novels themselves, often in the tones of Leo Tolstoy or Fyodor Dostoevsky. The aging brothers rake through decades of their old reviews as you read real Kirkus reviews of Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, Tom Wolfe, William Faulkner, Margaret Mitchell, J. D. Salinger, Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen King, Robert Ludlum’s Bourne novels, and many other famous lights. Here is Henry James who on New Year’s Eve finds himself with 26 books in print and a zero bank balance. Read about Faustian bargains writers make with Wellesian publishing colossus Alexander Buda Sugarman, who sucks up book companies as so many chilled fresh Oysters Rockefeller. And Sugarman believes he finds his late wife Ayn Rand reincarnated in Fyodor’s tragic wife Nastasya Filipovna. Do not miss the secret paupers’ catacombs under the Strand Book Store where skulls and bones of burnt out Manhattan writers rest by the thousands.