The Wolf Who Swallowed the Sun: A Jungian Fable of Family and Finance Across the Twentieth Century

by Donald Newlove

An enthralling and unorthodox dark fable, full of intrigue and comedy, and with a healthy dose of romance and sex. Written in 1998 but never before published, the novel is a sweeping saga of one family's greed, extortion, and double-crossing as they strive to acquire a controlling interest in the world's wealth. It is also the story of Billy Baxter, heir to this massive fortune who, with the help of a married couple of Chinese-Swiss Jungian psychiatrists (one of whom he has fallen in love with), seeks atonement for his family's sins. Oh, and he also happens to be a wolf.

252 pages, Paperback

Published July 15, 2019

About the author

Donald Newlove was born in Erie, Pennsylvania, in 1928, and currently lives in New York City's Greenwich Village. As a reporter, book reviewer, and short story writer, his work appeared in Esquire, New York Magazine, Evergreen Review, and The Saturday Review. His first novel, The Painter Gabriel (1970), was hailed by Time Magazine as "one of the best fictional studies of madness, descent, and purification that any American has written since Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." Newlove is the author of several other novels, a series of books on the art of writing, and the critically acclaimed memoir, Those Drinking Days: Myself and Other Writers (1981).

Reviews

[Geoffrey]

Hey, I read this. Great concept, and there were certain parts that I liked a lot, but it's really one of those appreciated-more-than-loved. I kept mentally comparing it to Blindfolded before the Firing Squad, which is hard not to do as the narrator here is very, very similar to Alex Sugarman in that book, but I just found that one much more compulsively readable. Still glad it's available! I hope that if Newlove has any other unpublished material, it sees print as well.

[Devin Curtis]

Glad this one got picked up by Tough Poets. The writing is great and the concept is incredible. I found some of it a little bogged down towards the middle, but the end was really great.

It feels both outdated, being informed as I believe it was by 70s/80s era tycoon financiers, and extremely relevant. Greed is so good it's enough to get you elected president these days though what we've all learned is that the really rich people in the world do everything they can to stay out of the spot light which is exactly what this book suggests.

[Randy Cox]

The framing device that is utilized makes a lot of the action come off as passive, but this is still only the kind of work that could be produced by the same mad genius who wrote a novel about drunken conjoined twins.