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Fission Among the Fanatics by Tom Bradley

This Bradley would make Lafcadio Hearn reel with laughter ... if not shake his
head in wonder.   Lolita Lark, RALPH

Tom Bradley is one of the most exasperating, offensive, pleasurable, and brilliant writers
I know. I recommend his work to anyone with spiritual fortitude and a taste for something
so strange that it might well be genius.   Denis Dutton, Arts & Letters Daily

Fission Among the Fanatics is about growing up downwind of hydrogen bomb test sites
(the sky turned black as midnight during lunchtime at my kindergarten), and receiving
my writerly vocation among Mormon fundamentalists. I end up pursuing that vocation in
exile, among religious nuts of a different stripe, in the most famous nuclear test sites of
all: Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It’s a full-circle deal, with an extended stopover of several
years in Red China.  (I was kicked out for political reasons, detailed in the book.)

Fission Among the Fanatics comes fully equipped with a critical appendix by Cye Johan.

This is a book-length tour-de-force essay on Tom Bradley and The Sam Edwine Pentateuch.
This may be the longest piece ever published in the Cybercorpse, and the first appearance
of a genre so strange we are turning away from naming it...   Andrei Codrescu

What critics, editors and authors have said about Tom’s previous books:

I found Acting Alone to have an incredible energy level.    Stanley Elkin, author of A Bad Man

The contemporaries of Michelangelo found it useful to employ the term terribilita to
characterize some of the expressions of his genius, and I will quote it here to sum
up the shocking impact of this novel as a whole. I read it in a state of fascination,
admiration, awe, anxiety, and outrage.    R.V. Cassill, editor of The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction

Tom Bradley is a writer of truly extravagant gifts...It is remarkable to me that anyone who
writes at such length could have an ear as fine as his for the rhythms of prose—but every
sentence is considered, balanced and felicitous... I’d be hard pressed to think of any writer
who has Bradley’s stamina, his range, his learning, his felicity.  Stephen Goodwin, author of Blood in Paradise

Beyond the almost flawless surface of his stylistic facility, I am most impressed by
Tom Bradley’s ability to walk the edge of a tone that is simultaneously irreverent and
profoundly serious. His work derives from the tradition of bawdy and absurdist black
comedy of the late sixties, but is not an imitative slave to that tradition. It seems to
me that Bradley has learned well from that generation of authors, but has mitigated
their example with an even more traditional moral seriousness. It is a delight to be
able to laugh aloud when one reads, and it is even more satisfying for a reader to
feel confident that there is a significant point to the laughter.   Gordon Weaver, author of The Way We Know in Dreams

A merciless humor and tireless passion for words not seen since the King James Bible
drive Bradley’s work at bullet-train speed through unmapped areas of linguistic elasticity
and imagination. Readers once begun will find their concentration hostaged from all
other diversions until they reach the last page.   David Wood, author of A Definitive Study of Sylvia Plath’s Imagery

Tom Bradley taught British and American literature to Chinese graduate
students in the years leading up to the Tiananmen Square massacre. He was
politely invited to leave China after burning a batch of student essays about the
democracy movement rather than surrendering them to "the leaders." He wound
up teaching conversational skills to freshman dentistry majors in the Japanese "imperial
university" where they used to vivisect our bomber pilots and serve their livers raw at
festive banquets. But his writing somehow sustains him.