The Wonderful Free Live

William H. Ansley, No pressure, but once you've "completed" your work on "Eyeflash," you can mine another Wolfe-does-Oz by annotating FREE LIVE FREE. (Are there any other direct Oz expressways in Wolfe?) While you've got the Oz loaded up in your brain. But first things first. As for THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR DEATH AND OTHER STORIES AND OTHER STORIES, I still weep that there has never been a hardcover edition of this book. And at this rate and/or point, there will probably never be one. For a time I toyed with the madcap idea of buying a half-dozen copies of the reprint (trade paperback) and having them re-bound as hardcovers--an expensive proposition, but not when compared to the cost/labor of small press publishing, and/or the time wasted waiting for someone else to do something that will probably never be done, and/or paying the premium price if/when some specialty press actually does it. =mantis=

mantis, I may try this; I am rather fond of FLF. But despite the many times I've read that FLF is a loose retelling of the Wizard of Oz, I don't buy it. The only real Oz reference is the clown character singing a parody of the song "If I only had a brain/heart/nerve" from the musical (movie) version. Any other Oz resemblances are so vague as to have been lost on me so far. And I have read FLF more than once. Well, maybe next time... but not any time real soon. William Ansley

I take the above back, partly. Shortly after I sent it, I remembered that Little Ozzie sings "We're Off to See the Wizard" at some point in FLF. Maybe I'll have to re-read FLF sooner than I thought and see if I forgot any more Oz stuff. William Ansley