Caliban's Filibuster - Paul West

Caliban, an embittered screenwriter of B-grade movies, yearns to be a great novelist. He is torn between the harsh reality of gainful employment, its inauthenticity, and the conflicting impulse to and recoil from the creative exploration of his Self and his world. Travelling with an incompetent actor (Murray McAndrew) and an authoritarian movie producer (Sammy Zeuss) from the United States to Japan to make one of Zeuss’s low-budget films, Caliban unfolds three meta-texts serving both as his artistic efforts to craft the great narrative and to rebel against the drudgework that he feels forced to undertake for Sammy Zeuss. These stories represent both his mutinous filibuster and his attempts to work through his own aesthetic paralysis and insecurity.

Paul West was one of the finest stylists in the literary canon—reading Caliban’s Filibuster is to plumb an imagination so rich and varied that one simply lives and breathes the curiosity with which he approaches the world.

INTRODUCTION BY JOSEPH F. PESTINO
INTERVIEW BY GEORGE PLIMPTON