This image is the cover for the book Taboo, Classics To Go

Taboo, Classics To Go

Taboo (1921) is a comic fantasy novel by James Branch Cabell. Set in a world where history and fantasy collide, where a lowly pawnbroker can encounter monsters, gods, and devils. Cabell tells the story of Philistia, a country dedicated to the persecution of all manner of ill-defined vice and taboo. Bold and satirical, this thinly veiled critique of his own, high-minded critics is essential to understanding Cabell's vision of art. Cabell's work has long been described as escapist, his novels and stories derided as fantastic and obsessive recreations of a world lost long ago. To read Taboo, however, is to understand that the issues therein--the struggle for power, the unspoken distance between men and women--were vastly important not only at the time of its publication, but in our own, divisive world. (Google)

James Branch Cabell

James Branch Cabell; (April 14, 1879 – May 5, 1958) was an American author of fantasy fiction and belles-lettres. Cabell was well-regarded by his contemporaries, including H. L. Mencken, Edmund Wilson, and Sinclair Lewis. His works were considered escapist and fit well in the culture of the 1920s, when they were most popular. For Cabell, veracity was "the one unpardonable sin, not merely against art, but against human welfare." Although escapist, Cabell's works are ironic and satirical. Mencken disputed Cabell's claim to romanticism and characterized him as "really the most acidulous of all the anti-romantics. His gaudy heroes ... chase dragons precisely as stockbrokers play golf." Cabell saw art as an escape from life, but found that, once the artist creates his ideal world, it is made up of the same elements that make the real one

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