Bedlam Burning [antikvár]

"It all starts at Cambridge University, in the rooms of Dr. John Bentley, a don famous for his book burning parties - "a little active, symbolic literary criticism." Guests are invited to bring a book - everything from Tropic of Cancer to Fahrenheit 451 gets the treatment - and state their grudge against it before tossing it into Bentley's smoking hearth." It is at one such party that Gregory Collins, a brilliant but unprepossessing fledgling writer (he consigns one of his own manuscripts to the flames) meets Mike Smith, a handsome classmate. After graduation, when Collins's first novel, The Wax Man, is accepted for publication, he convinces Smith to take his place on the book jacket. As a result, it is Smith rather than Collins who receives an offer to be writer-in-residence at the asylum in Brighton run by Dr. James Kincaid, whose obscure therapeutic philosophy centers on the soothing powers of literature. It is not long before the boundaries between inmate and observer are blurred. When Smith compiles a book of the inmates' writings, and it becomes a literary success, this comedy of errors threatens to become a tragedy.