The Book of Madness and Cures (41 page)
Read The Book of Madness and Cures Online
Authors: Regina O'Melveny
My deepest appreciation goes out to my brilliant agent, Dan Lazar, and to my dedicated first editor, Allison McCabe. Many thanks to all at Little, Brown and Company, in particular my wonderful editor Judy Clain, and also Michael Pietsch, Nathan Rostron, Amanda Tobier, Carolyn O’Keefe, Pamela Marshall, Morgan Moroney, Heather Fain, Amanda Brown, Nicole Dewey, Peggy Freudenthal, and Keith Hayes.
Regina O’Melveny’s poetry has been published widely in literary journals, garnering several prizes. She grew up at the edge of pungent chaparral in La Mesa, California. During college and in the years after, she traveled widely, and these experiences later inspired
The Book of Madness and Cures,
her first novel. She lives with her husband in Rancho Palos Verdes, near the Los Angeles harbor, where she can watch the blue transit of ships.
Also by Regina O’Melveny
Blue Wolves: Poems and Assemblages
Fireflies: Poems
Contents
Chapter 1: God’s Work or the Devil’s Machinations
Chapter 2: Salt and Sweet, Tears and Milk
Chapter 3: Dr. Cardano’s House
Chapter 5: One Must Be Kind to Beasts
Chapter 6: Before the Sea of Black Woods
Chapter 8: Fires That Never Burn
Chapter 9: Dr. Rainer Fuchs,Professor of Botany
Chapter 10: Where the Root Is in the House, the Devil Can Do No Harm
Chapter 11: Manifestations of Solar Madness
Chapter 12: Lost Governance of the Whole
Chapter 13: What Was Lost Was Returned
Chapter 14: The Patient Owns the Remedy
Chapter 15: The Vanishing Bend in the Path
Chapter 16: To Make Way for the New
Chapter 17: Sorrow Be Banished
Chapter 18: The Sap That Slows the World
Chapter 19: The Mountains Are Full of Wonderful Creatures
Chapter 21: A Border Between Continents
Chapter 22: My Father’s Keeper
Chapter 23: We Are Housed by the Past
Chapter 24: The Basin of the Dead
Chapter 26: Make His Entrance Wide
Chapter 27: Stitching Sky to Mountain
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 2012 by Regina O’Melveny
Cover design by Keith Hayes
Cover art:
Portrait of Giovanna Tornabuoni
, 1489–1490 by Domenico Ghirlandaio, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid / Lutz Braun / Art Resource, NY; pharmacy emblem, ceramic tile from Artesanía Talaverana, Talavera de la Reina, Toledo; flask from
Tractatus de Pestilentia
(Treatise on Plague), 15th-c. manuscript by M. Albik, The Art Archive / University Library Prague / Gianni Dagli Orti;
View of the Canal of Santa Chiara
, Venice, ca. 1840–1859 by Giovanni Antonio Canaletto, Musée Cognacq-Jay, Paris. Giraudon / The Bridgeman Art Library
Cover copyright © 2012 Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at
[email protected]
. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
Little, Brown and Company
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First e-book edition: April 2012
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Lines from
Purgatorio
by Dante Alighieri, translated by W. S. Merwin, copyright © 2000 by W. S. Merwin. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
Lines from capitolo 24 by Veronica Franco in chapter 5, “The Courtesan in Exile,” from
The Honest Courtesan, Veronica Franco, Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth-Century Venice,
translated by Margaret Rosenthal, © 1992. Used by permission from the University of Chicago Press.
Lines from Ovid’s
Metamorphoses,
translated by A. D. Melville (1998), “The Doctrines of Pythagorus,” p. 335, XV, lines 103–105, used by permission of Oxford University Press.
Facsimile map from
The Mercator Atlas of Europe
© Walking Tree Press. Reproduced with permission.
Inset map by G.W. Ward
ISBN 978-0-316-19582-9
