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New Photo Illustrated Edition of Badlands, the acclaimed 1996 Book-of-the-Month novel by Melinda Camber Porter.
Badlands received a Star Review from Donna Seaman of Booklist. "In the South Dakota Badlands Melinda Camber Porter so powerfully conjures is a place where wounds don't heal."
"A Novel of Startling Lyricism." Publishers Weekly
"Badlands has a narrative with a weighty sensuality that carries the reader forward in a kind of drunken, dreamlike state." New York Times
"Badlands is a very strong, very intelligent and very intriguing novel." Joyce Carol Oates
"Melinda Camber Porter should be congratulated on Badlands: she knows her subject thoroughly; her vision is lyrical, yet unflinching. Badlands is an achievement." Peter Matthiessen
"In Badlands, Melinda Camber Porter has focused her English intelligence on America and rendered it as an uneasy dream of sex and death and abandonment, a mirage with the power of possession." Joan Didion
"Badlands is an extraordinary book. Its imagery makes one think of William Blake. Better than a novel, it reads like a fierce poem, with a devastating effect on our self-esteem." Louis Malle (French filmmaker)
About the author
Melinda Camber Porter (1953 - 2008) was born in London and graduated from Oxford University with a First Class Honors degree in Modern Languages.
She began her writing career in Paris as a cultural correspondent for The Times of London. French culture is the subject of her book Through Parisian Eyes (published by Oxford University Press), which the Boston Globe describes as "a particularly readable and brilliantly and uniquely compiled collection."
She interviewed many leading cultural figures including four Nobel Prize winners such as Saul Bellow and Gunter Grass, and others; Joyce Carol Oates, Joan Diddion, Frances Sagan, Michael Apted, Martin Scorsese, and Wim Wenders. Camber Porter's left over 50 audio recordings of these interviews.
Her novel Badlands, a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, was set on South Dakota's Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Publishers Weekly stated "a novel of startling, dreamlike lyricism."
A film documenting the creation of the paintings featured in this solo exhibition, entitled The Art of Love, showed regularly on Public Television stations nationally and a collection of her poetry and paintings, also entitled The Art of Love, served as companion to the show.
Camber Porter's paintings have also served as the primary inspiration and as backdrops for several of her theatrical works. She created the backdrops, book, and lyrics for the musical Night Angel, with music by Carmen Moore and was originally performed at Lincoln Center in New York City. She created the book, lyrics, and backdrops for the rock-opera-in-progress, Journey to Benares, with music, direction and choreography by Elizabeth Swados, and was performed at the Asia Society and Museum in New York City in November 2003.
Melinda Camber Porter leaves a prolific and creative legacy with thousands of paintings; over two hundred hours of audio and film interviews with global creative figures in the arts, film and literature; and her tens of thousands of pages of writings: novels, plays, essays, journalism and volumes of poetry. Her creative and spiritual works will be enjoyed for generations.
