750 S. Spaulding Ave., Suite 112
Los Angeles, CA 90036

Essays, Manifestos, Statements, Speeches, Maxims, Epistles, Diaristic Jottings, Narratives, Natural histories, Poems, Plays, Performances, Ramblings, Revelations, and all such ephemera as may appear necessary to bring society into a slight tremolo of confusion and fright at least.

The Life of Jesus: An Apocryphal Novel

Toby Olson

Digital Edition
A PDF file will be sent within 24 hours of payment

The first full fiction by now noted American poet and fiction writer, Toby Olson, The Life of Jesus is not precisely the work its title might suggest. The book is neither a historical fiction nor a devout retelling of the mission and passion of Christ. Rather, Olson's work is an unabashed and intimately revealing autobiographical fiction told primarily in the terms of Gospel legend. As the author writes:

To a boy raised in the bosom of the Catholic Church in the early 1940s, the life of Jesus and the Holy Family was felt as his own idealized autobiography. His mother was of course a Virgin. His father, who was ill and died young, was more a watcher than a participant. And he himself was guilty, because he was no Jesus and could not cure his father. The Life of Jesus is a result of that somewhat tortured matrix.

As the novel proceeds from the fairy-tale-like childhood of Jesus, through his public life of miracles, temptations, and teachings, it moves closer to autobiography. Only after Jesus has lived through the difficulties of being neither completely God nor man is he able to proceed to his own necessary death, to return to his father.

The mythology of this novel is constructed from that sense of the life of Jesus which was received by a young boy, in Catholic School, from the Bible stories of Irish nuns.

Olson's gently believing and, at times, apostate work has been praised by numerous poets and fiction writers. Poet Diane Wakoski wrote: "The The Life of Jesus is a rare work. Alluringly erotic, imaginative, witty and funny, the book is a daring parable of 20th-century autobiography. The New Testament as science fiction. The story of one's life is an understanding of miracle."

Green Integer is publishing several new, older, and out-of-stock Sun & Moon, Green Integer, and other archived titles online. Some of these will appear for free, others will be priced affordably low.

Donations for this service are welcome.