The Touch of Treason

by Sol Stein

Overview

As one of the characters in this enthralling novel remarks, "The Russians play chess, Americans play checkers." Into this arena, as if into a trap, walks George Thomassy, a brilliant defense attorney coerced into defending a gifted young man accused of murdering America's most prescient Russian expert just as he is about to finish his major work on the U.S.S.R. Thomassy's lover, Francine Widmer, an attractive, bright, politically aware woman, understands what Thomassy doesn't: in this, His greatest trial, watched by the world's press, his more formidable enemy is his own innocence of the world outside the courtroom, where there are crimes worse than murder. Thomassy, whose skill is winning, faces a decision no lawyer can walk away from.The Touch of Treason is a multilayered love story, a profound entertainment of acute suspense that we might expect from an American Graham Greene. Its strobelike insights into man, love, crime, and human relationships open up a century that has trapped both its characters and its readers in what surely must be both the best and worst of times. And its excitement, its pace, its surprises are the glorious trappings of a novel rich in characters and ideas.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781611877496
Publisher:	Histria Fiction
Publication date:	05/18/2014
Sold by:	INDEPENDENT PUB GROUP - EPUB - EBKS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	275
File size:	772 KB

About the Author

Sol Stein edited and published some of the outstanding writers of the 20th century, including James Baldwin, David Frost, Jack Higgins, Elia Kazan, Dylan Thomas, Lionel Trilling, W. H. Auden, Jacques Barzun, and three heads of state. He is a prize-winning playwright produced on Broadway, an anthologized poet, the author of nine novels, plus nonfiction books, screenplays, and TV dramas. His novel The Magician sold over one million copies. His book Stein on Writing is now in trade paperback, and on tape, CD, and MP3. A more advanced writing book, How to Grow a Novel, has been selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club. Stein's work has been translated into French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Swedish, Finish, Danish, Dutch, Greek, Japanese, and Russian. Stein has lectured on creative writing at Columbia University, the University of Iowa, and the University of California at Irvine, which presented him with the Distinguished Instructor Award in 1993 for his courses on dialogue and advanced fiction writing. Columbia University has established an archive for more than 1600 books published by Stein and Day, and an archive of Stein's own manuscripts and his editorial work on the manuscripts of successful authors. In 1999, a distinguished panel selected by the Modern Library chose two nonfiction books edited by Stein in the top half of "the 100 best nonfiction works of the century," James Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son and George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia. Native Sons (8/2/04) contains the correspondence that produced Notes of a Native Son, as well as newly-discovered photographs and their two collaborations, "Dark Runner" and the television play Equal in Paris.Stein's play "Napoleon" won the Dramatists Alliance Prize for "the best full-length play of 1953" and was performed both in New York and California. With Tennessee Williams, William Inge, and Robert Anderson, he was a founding member of the Playwrights Group at the Actors Studio.