Writing Madness — Patrick McGrath

    A fine, still sealed copy in a fine dust jacket. Limited to 300 copies, each signed by Patrick McGrath, Joyce Carol Oates, Harry Brockway, and Danel Olson. Bound in full black Cialux cloth. Two colorprinting throughout. Ribbon marker. Printed endsheets. Red top edge-stain. Head and tail bands. Introductory essay by Oates, endnote by Olson, illustrated by Brockway.       
   Features the complete contents of McGrath's brilliant 1987 debut collection, Blood and Water and Other Tales, the three novellas of Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now, six previously uncollected short stories, seven essays, and over twenty of McGrath's insightful and engaging introductions and book reviews.       
   For thirty years Patrick McGrath's novels have received high critical acclaim worldwide, and won prizes internationally, but Writing Madness is the first large-scale collection of his short fiction oeuvre. Son of Broadmoor Hospital's longest serving medical superintendent, McGrath offers his account of childhood in the shadow of the walls of Britain's largest top-security mental hospital, "A Boy's Broadmoor," along with an astonishing account of a bizarre true-life tragedy, "Death of a Silent Twin," and many more.      
   Printed with the highest Italian craftsmanship by the same Bortolazzi family publishers of Verona (est. 1953) who crafted Helmut Newton's photography book SUMO for Taschen (1999), which weighed 66 pounds, immediately sold out, and had its autographed copy #1 fetch the highest auction price of any new book of the 20th century ($430,000). Writing Madness is only the third volume manufactured by the esteemed Editoriale Bortolazzi Stei for Centipede Press, the others being Clark Ashton Smith's The Averoigne Chronicles (2016) and Men of Wealth and Taste: Michael Joseph's Photographs of The Rolling Stones (2015).