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The Great Prince Died

A Novel about the Assassination of Trotsky

With a New Afterword by William T. Vollmann
Buy this book: The Great Prince Died
Paper
$22.00
ISBN: 9780226260648
Published September 2015
epub
$21.99
ISBN: 9780226260785
Published September 2015
pdf
$21.99
ISBN: 9780226260785
Published September 2015

The Great Prince Died

A Novel about the Assassination of Trotsky

With a New Afterword by William T. Vollmann
On August 20, 1940, Marxist philosopher, politician, and revolutionary Leon Trotsky was attacked with an ice axe in his home in Coyoacán, Mexico. He died the next day.

In The Great Prince Died, Bernard Wolfe offers his lyrical, fictionalized account of Trotsky’s assassination as witnessed through the eyes of an array of characters: the young American student helping to translate the exiled Trotsky’s work (and to guard him), the Mexican police chief, a Rumanian revolutionary, the assassin and his handlers, a poor Mexican “peón,” and Trotsky himself. Drawing on his own experiences working as the exiled Trotsky’s secretary and bodyguard and mixing in digressions on Mexican culture, Stalinist tactics, and Bolshevik history, Wolfe interweaves fantasy and fact, delusion and journalistic reporting to create one of the great political novels of the past century.

416 pages | 1 line drawing | 6 x 9 | © 2015

Fiction

Reviews

“Wolfe is a remarkable and essential lost American voice, and Great Prince is one of his finest books, drawing on his vast verbal and intellectual powers, the keenness of his storytelling gift, and the rich ferocity of his polemical vision. What he brings to the historical novel is the opposite of a bogus ‘objectivity’—instead, Wolfe rightly sees the twentieth century in dialectical terms—an eruption of a series of arguments, subjectivities, viewpoints, and the inevitable tragedy of their irreconcilability.”

Jonathan Lethem

“Wolfe manages to turn the minutiae of Trotsky’s assassination into a powerfully written thriller.”

Mark Perryman | Philosophy Football

“Illuminating for its insight into the moment when a great struggle for human liberation became a tyranny that still threatens the world. . . . No one who reads The Great Prince Died . . . can fail to be gripped by a tale well told. Its message is one the free world will ignore at its peril.”

Selden Rodman | New York Times

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