Post Mon Feb 11, 2008 11:19 am

In Milton Lumky Territory (TOR)

In Milton Lumky Territory (Hardcover)
by Philip K. Dick (Author)
Hardcover: 224 pages
Publisher: Tor Books; First Edition edition (April 29, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0765316951
ISBN-13: 978-0765316950

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Review
“A kind of pulp-fiction Kafka, a prophet.”
--The New York Times

“Remarkable. . .echoes of Dick’s contemporaries such as Ralph Ellison, Richard Yates, Rod Serling, Raymond Chandler and early Kurt Vonnegut Jr. resonate. . . . Dick fans will be in rapture.”
--Publishers Weekly [boxed review] on Voices from the Street


Book Description
In The Novels of Philip K. Dick, Kim Stanley Robinson states that "In Milton Lumky Territory . . . is probably the best of Dick's realist novels aside from Confessions of a Crap Artist," and calls it a "bitter indictment of the effects of capitalism." Dick, on the other hand, in his forward, says "This is actually a very funny book, and a good one, too."

Milton Lumky territory is both an area of the western USA and a psychic terrain: the world and world-view of the traveling salesman. The story takes place in Boise, Idaho, with some extraordinary long-distance driving sequences in which our hero (young Bruce Stevens) drives from Boise to San Francisco, to Reno, to Pocatello, to Seattle, and back to Boise in search of a good deal on some wholesale typewriters. He falls under the spell of an attractive older woman (who used to be his school teacher) and Milton Lumky, a middle-aged paper salesman whose territory is the Northwest. And then Bruce and the others slowly sink into the whirlpool of his immature personal obsessions and misperceptions.

A compassionate and ironic portrayal of three characters enmeshed in a sticky web of everyday events, in a tension between love and money, with a basic failure to communicate, In Milton Lumky Territory stands out among Dick's early works.

http://www.amazon.com/Milton-Lumky-Terr ... ef=ed_oe_h