Written after several years of exile in the People's Republic of China, Black Class Cur is set in that country on the eve of the latest Tiananmen Square Massacre. The main characters are a former Red Guard still trying to fight the Cultural Revolution in a remote rural area, and his younger brother who gets fatally involved in the student demonstrations. They come up against an American "foreign expert" who represents everything they despise. The latter's main preoccupation is locating a baby to adopt, with or without the help of a variegated gang of Palestinians, Liberians, Pakistanis and other third-world "medical exchange students," who must spend their waking hours slaving in the municipal abortion mill. Your years in China should stand you in good stead. That vast land is still terra incognita as far as the eye of fiction is concerned ... Your title is offputting. John Updike , author of Cunts When is the world going to wake up to the genius of Tom Bradley? … One of the most criminally underrated authors on the planet. Andrew Gallix , of The Guardian, Financial Times, Irish Times, New Statesman, BBC Radio 3, the Independent, Literary Review and The Times Literary Supplement The contemporaries of Michelangelo found it useful to employ the term terribilita to characterize some of the expressions of his genius, and I will quote it here to sum up the shocking impact of this work as a whole. I read it in a state of fascination, admiration, awe, anxiety, and outrage. R.V. Cassill , editor of The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction Tom Bradley is one of the most exasperating, offensive, pleasurable, and brilliant writers I know. I recommend his work to anyone with spiritual fortitude and a taste for something so strange that it might well be genius. Denis Dutton , editor of Arts & Letters Daily ("among the most influential media personalities in the world," according to Time Magazine)