Sweet Adversity

Originally published in 1978, Sweet Adversity is two novels in one. Author Donald Newlove edited his critically acclaimed novels of jazz-playing alcoholic conjoined twins, Leo & Theodore (1972) and The Drunks (1974), into a single volume for the release, explaining in his Author's Note that "the story loses scope and focus when halved into two books." Further, he stated that his original texts were "forever CANCELLED and do not represent my final thoughts about my twins."

The New York Times called Leo & Theodore "One of the most desperately funny books we've been given in a long time." And, of The Drunks, The New Yorker wrote, "A dazzling highwire act ... the sheer inventiveness and strength of his writing turn risk into triumph, drunken monologues into subtle satire, A.A. meetings into riveting dramas, and what in another writer might be bathos into brilliant comedy ... probably the most clear-eyed and moving-and certainly one of the most honest-books ever written about alcoholics."

About the Author
Newlove, Donald: - Donald Newlove was born in Erie, Pennsylvania, in 1928, and currently lives in New York City's Greenwich Village. As a reporter, book reviewer, and short story writer, his work appeared in Esquire, New York Magazine, Evergreen Review, and The Saturday Review. His first novel, The Painter Gabriel (1970), was hailed by Time Magazine as "one of the best fictional studies of madness, descent, and purification that any American has written since Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." Newlove is the author of several other novels, a series of books on the art of writing, and the critically acclaimed memoir, Those Drinking Days: Myself and Other Writers (1981).