ARLINGTON, Mass. - BostonChron -- Tough Poets Press is pleased to finally announce the publication of Michael Brodsky's latest novel, Invidicum.

Twenty years in the making, this 1,188-page opus is a sprawling satirical novel about an experimental drug for "Envy Disease" (with some surprising off-label uses) and those involved in its clinical trials: participants, drug developers, psychiatrists, technicians, advertisers, hangers-on, etc. Of the novel, Brodsky states, "I think this book is my 'richest.' It did start out . . . propelled by a preposterous desire to write something more accessible—to achieve a breakthrough." The book features cover art and illustrations by internationally acclaimed artist Michael Hafftka.

Advance praise for Invidicum

"Brodsky has produced a ferocious tour de force. . . . Writers will be green with envy, and readers pink with pleasure at Brodsky's endlessly inventive language."
— Steven Moore, author of The Novel: An Alternative History

"No one but Michael Brodsky could have written this. . . . For my money, the great theme of Invidicum is language itself through the medium of a novel and the adventure of reading."

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— Mark Kerstetter, The Mockingbird Sings

Please visit www.toughpoets.com/brodsky_invidicum.htm for more information about Invidicum and to download a PDF preview of the book's first few pages.

About the author

Michael Brodsky is the author of fourteen published works of fiction. They include the novels Detour (1977, revised 2003) for which he received the Ernest Hemingway Foundation Citation from PEN, Circuits (1985), Xman (1987), Dyad (1989), and Lurianics (2013), and the collections Project and Other Short Pieces (1982), X in Paris (1988), Southernmost and Other Stories (1996) and Limit Point (2007).

"You know at once you are in the hands (the unrelenting grip) of a serious workman who reserves the right to amaze you several times on each page with sheer prose felicity."
— Paul West, The New York Times Book Review

"Brodsky possesses a masterly control of diction and rhythm, an often startling metaphoric gift, and a range of effects extending from Swiftian bluntness to Proustian elaboration."
— The New York Review of Books

"A sensitive, original, and thoughtful writer, one of the best produced by this country in the last 30 years."
— Harvey Pekar, The Village Voice