More information to be announced soon on this forthcoming title from Penguin USAFrom the PublisherPetroleum Man is a novel of Swiftean malice and biting humor that challenges the dogmas of both sides of the current sociopolitical divide--blue states and red states, haves and havenots, trickle-down conservatives and bleeding-heart liberals. Bewildered by the odious "liberal democrat" tendencies of his son-in-law Chip, Leon Tuggs--self-made arch-capitalist billionaire, inventor of the ubiquitous and environmentally hazardous Thingie, and author of the influential General Theory of Industrial Sex--decides to rescue his grandchildren from a life of guilt, indecision, and existential anxiety by educating them in the way the world actually works and telling them the things no teacher or parent in our politically-correct and morally relative universe could ever venture to say. These life lessons to his grandchildren are accompanied by gifts--cast-iron replicas of the cars he has owned during his own life, a life in cars. From the 1939 Ford Fordor Sedan, in which the idea for Tugg's first invention was conceived, to the 1992 Lincoln Town Car Stretch Limousine, the entree to a hysterically charged confrontation between Tuggs and his family, Petroleum Man takes delight in exposing the vanity and frailty of some of the most popularly held prejudices of our times. About the AuthorStanley Crawford is the author of five previous novels, Gascoyne, Travel Notes, The Log of the S.S. The Mrs. Unguentine, and Some Instructions, as well as three works of non-fiction, A River in Winter, Mayordomo, and A Garlic Testament. He was born in New Mexico.

"Meet Gascoyne, a new breed of hero, a man who spends whole weeks in his car, eats there, sleeps there, and conducts his business - wielding power, pinching pennies, and fostering corruption - by mobile phone as he somehow manages to drive through bumper-to-bumper traffic at fifty miles an hour. But he's found a new preoccupation, hunting down the killer - last seen slithering away from the crime scene in a tree-sloth costume - of his business associate and finding out how the southern California megalopolis has suddenly slipped out of his grasp." A tour de force blending of genres - Alfred Hitchcock, jungle-war novels, science fiction, mad doctor movies, Westerns, James Bond, 18th-century mock epics, Greek tragedy and hardboiled detective stories - first published in 1966, Gascoyne is a hilarious look into a future that looks remarkably like the present.

1972