Three Novels

These three very different novels by John Henry Mackay will delight and intrigue the reader. The first is a very brief, but biting satire on small-town life in Germany at the end of the 19th century-with some now rather outdated (?) free-love propaganda. The second, set in Berlin in the 1920s, is a gripping thriller that only an anarchist-like Mackay-could write. The third illustrates Mackay's philosophical egoism in a bittersweet tale of the aftermath of a youth misspent in conformity to convention. An appreciation of the three novels is in an afterword by the translator.