Site Content

Blair Mountain Press

ISBN 978-0-9861789-1-7

Native Americans named the first full moon of the month after the primary characteristic of that month.  Strawberries are the earliest fruit to ripen, thus the name of the moon.  On June 20, 2016, the summer solstice and the full moon coincided, the first time that has happened since 1948. In England, the strawberry moon is called the rose moon. In China, it’s called the lotus moon.

Blair Mountain Press

ISBN  978-0-9768817-3-5

Publisher’s Note:

    I personally know very little about Vasek Drobny.  He telephoned, I suppose, because I am the publisher of books related to Appalachia and he needed someone with whom he could entrust his manuscript.  He asked if we could meet in the park, by the fountain.  He would be wearing a brown driving cap.  Unable to resist a mystery, I agreed.  On that bright autumn day, the ancient trees in the park were achingly beautiful—the cochineal and vermilion, the cadmium and ocher—and the fountain, though its re-fulgent rise and fall was glitteringly undiminished, appeared to sigh in the radiance of the evening sun.  And there he was, a sack of bread in his hand, feeding the pigeons and sparrows by the lily pond.  Other than the odd cap, he was the most nondescript of men, neither dark nor fair, tall nor short, handsome nor ugly.  He was ordinary except for his eyes, which were large and brown—the color of oak leaves in October—and for his voice, which was warm and modulated, with hardly a trace of an accent.

    What little I know of his history I gained through our next few meetings.  He was born in 1933 in Prague; he attended Charles University on a scholarship; his interests were literary (he mentioned Thomas Mann, Conrad, Kafka, Austen, Proust, Henry James and Faulkner); he was so re-pulsed by Stalin that, with the initiation of the Warsaw Pact in 1955, he fled Czechoslovakia, making his way through Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and finally to Greece, where he gained passage to America; in Chicago he found distant relatives, but was closer to those in Pennsylvania, and even more so to those in the coal fields of West Virginia; he clerked for the De-partment of Education; and he was determined—it now being 1968—to return to Czechoslovakia so that he could further the liberation of his coun-try from Russian totalitarianism and the excesses of industrialization.

    But the point of his autobiographical revelations had to do with his novel.  While in Romania, Transylvania to be exact, he had an experience of such strangeness that it haunted him during his sojourn in America, an episode which, he said, the novel would reveal.  He handed me the manu-script and, with a sardonic smile, remarked that such a literary exercise had been a holiday, both from the tedium of clerking and from the serious issue of resisting communism in his native country.

    That first meeting occurred forty years ago, and for some reason (a minor obligation forestalled, perhaps, until almost forgotten) I never took the manuscript out of the file cabinet until last year—doing so, I think, as a way of tidying up before mortality deprived me of the chore.  I was so taken by the novel and its eccentricity that I attempted to contact Mr. Drobny and those who knew him, but without much success.  There were  language barriers on the telephone and translation problems on the inter-net.  My search led to two simple facts:  he had worked in the Ministry of Culture under President Vaclav Havel and had died in 1990.  

    After having found no relatives or kin, I assumed that giving me the manuscript was his tacit permission for publishing it, which I have now done, with the hope that his peculiar story will intrigue the reader.

-Victor Marshall Depta                          

January 1, 2008

Blair Mountain Press

ISBN  0-9666608-6-2

In the first volume, a Jewish medical student dropout from Los Angeles is inadvertently the cause of levitation, a loincloth and love in a West Virginia family. Two brothers and a sister bring to the stage their high-spirited improvisations and their desperate reality. An old woman up a hollow is visited by an angel, more or less. A very old dead woman rises from her casket during her wake, two ghosts walk on stage, and two elderly sisters make dramatic what was or wasn't incest with their brother or nephew or an orphan. In the second volume is a scoundrel, a professor, a suitcase full of money, a lovesick fellow and a scrappy mother and daughter. There's a near hanging, fornication in a tent, and a near drowning in a baby pool. There are ghosts and a wad of money. There is a satellite dish mistaken for the moon, a moony boy and a large woman with a gargantuan need for babies and the National Inquirer. Such are the goings-on in these delightful, unsettling comedies.