Reality and Romance Clash in South Sea Stories

A new trade paperback edition of Louis Becke's first collection of South Sea stories. This once-famous author, once called the 'Kipling of the Pacific, has lost recognition by the public over time, but James Michener and A Grove Day have acknowledged him the very best writer of the Pacific.

Known as the Kipling of the Pacific," Louis Beckes stories of island life were filled with the ironic melodramas of reality. A trader, purser, sometime pirate, and irrepressible wanderer, Becke lived much of what he wrote, and often the give and take of conversational yarns on a midnight watch became the stimulus for a story.

For Becke, the reality of the situation was everything. As A. Grove Day noted in Rascals in Paradise: A surprising number of Beckes stories end in sudden and even gruesome death but without the effect of horror or even regret. That was the way men died in the late-nineteenth-century Pacific and the author is merely relating a normal experience."

By Reef and Palm, Beckes first collection of stories, has been reprinted by Dixon-Price Publishing, Kingston Wash., in an affordable paperback edition. The volumes fourteen stories, ranging the South Seas from Easter Island to the Carolines, tell of everyday Europeans and island natives caught in situations that test their common humanity--and the readers entrenched values. Beckes spare descriptions evoke both the beauty and the savagery of the Pacific stage with a vibrancy few writers can match.

Becke doesnt follows literary conventions. As Day once said about Becke, his art is in being 'artless. His stories--more like tales told over a beer in the local pub--often show powerful truths about the ironically harsh realities of paradise with a haunting, indefinably sad allusion to the short and very tenuous condition of life.

By Reef and Palm is available through bookstores, Amazon.com, or directly from the publisher at www.dixonprice.com. Stores and libraries can order the trade paperback from Ingram or Baker & Taylor. Review copies or cover photos can be requested from Dixon-Price Publishing, 9105 Leprechaun Lane, Kingston, WA 98346, (360) 297-8702.