Seven Keys to Hell

New York: Vantage Press. Near Fine in Very Good dj. (c.1969). First Edition. Hardcover. [good solid copy with minimal shelfwear, light dust-soiling to top of text block; the jacket shows light edgewear, a small scuff mark at the upper left corner of the front panel, and a ragged closed tear and some associated creasing at the top of the rear panel]. "Here is a big novel on a scale appropriate to its theme -- the political life of Yugoslav-Americans in the Twentieth Century. Concentrating mainly on the years of the Second World War, [the author] writes with vigor and intensity of the grim power-struggles among ex-Yugoslavs in the United States. These are fired with all the passionate chauvinism of Balkan politics, transplanted to an explosive New World setting." It's big, all right -- 789 pages! -- and like many such vanity-press novels with very specific settings, one gets the strong sense that the author was writing from personal experience. Unfortunately, however -- and very UNlike many vanity-press books -- the author has not seen fit to supply even a dollop of autobiographical information in order to establish his bona fides. (It is, I guess you could say, a vanity-press book without the vanity.) Among other things, this leaves us to wonder if "Bogomil Dubrovnik" might be a pseudonym, which his (or her) name definitely suggests: the Bogomils were a religious sect active in Bosnia and Herzegovina between the 10th and 14th centuries, and Dubrovnik is a prominent Croatian city. ***This book is among the nearly 150 items offered in ReadInk's new Catalog Number 4, "Booking Passage: Books on the Immigrant Experience." You can access this catalog and its contents in any one of three ways: (1) email us to request a PDF to be emailed to you; (2) view or download the catalog from the link on our website's main page; (3) browse the books individually (including a few that didn't make the cut for the catalog) on our website under these two subject headings: "Immigration: Fiction" and "Immigration: Non-fiction." .