Redfiend Publishing Announces Maud Blessingbourne’s Temptations and Other Poems by Award-Winning Author Alexander Theroux, Featuring Cover Art by the Late Edward Gorey
Redfiend Publishing is proud to announce the release of Maud Blessingbourne’s Temptations and Other Poems, a new poetry collection by acclaimed novelist and poet Alexander Theroux. This very special collection offers the reader poems on a wide variety of subjects, ranging from its signature title to the kind of splendid, if idiosyncratic, array of poems typical of Alexander Theroux.
Royal Palm Beach, FL, June 30, 2026 --(PR.com)-- Redfiend Publishing is proud to announce the release of Maud Blessingbourne’s Temptations and Other Poems, a new poetry collection by acclaimed novelist and poet Alexander Theroux. This very special collection offers the reader poems on a wide variety of subjects, ranging from its signature title to the kind of splendid, if idiosyncratic, array of poems typical of Alexander Theroux.
The title figure, Maud Blessingbourne, originates in Henry James’s 1902 story “The Story in It,” where she appears as an observant and reflective reader. In this collection, the signature poem, “Maud Blessingbourne’s Temptations,” extends that portrait, so to speak, into a poetic memoir—a confession that is both condensed and deeply penetrating, almost Augustinian in its scrupulous intensity and passion. It offers a frank, quirky, yet meaningful account of a headstrong young American artist in Paris, orphaned early, tracing the contours of her vivid, self-igniting search for grace.
“The conflicts that inform a writer’s novels, stories, poems, and essays grow of course from the turmoil, the friction and reversals he or she faces in life,” says author Alexander Theroux. “Sinners commit, saints omit. Otherwise, a writer ‘writes white.’ Whatever the unavoidable truth is, that is the fortifiant, what you witness, the facts you are dealt, need recognize, and therefore must face to use. What life hands one—in aggregate—creates the drama of the poems that one is driven to write, and in a very real way actually comprises your style. A writer writes in the way a wounded cowboy bites a bullet.”
The book features original cover art drawn by the late Edward Gorey—the celebrated author and illustrator known for his distinctive fusion of elegance, absurdity, and dark humor—who was “… a good friend, a close neighbor on Cape Cod, and a frequent visitor …” of the author. The artwork, created for Theroux decades ago, now finds its natural home in this new volume of poems. “At times, way back, I quite often read Ted Gorey some of my poems,” Theroux added. “Years ago, at my house, I well recall reading him a shorter version of ‘Maud,’ since obsessive women always amused and intrigued him, while I outlined a book of poems I had put aside for years. I remember how delighted I was in his drawing the cover that I finished the signature poem that week.”
This collection is a fund of lyric poems, ballads, novels-in-stories, dramatic monologues, sonnets, and elegies.
Availability
Maud Blessingbourne’s Temptations and Other Poems is now available in hardcover through Amazon. Paperback and eBook editions will follow. A limited number of autographed first-edition hardcovers with custom-designed bookplates are available directly from Redfiend Publishing.
About the Author
Alexander Theroux is the author of four acclaimed novels—Three Wogs (1972), Darconville’s Cat (1982), An Adultery (1987), and Laura Warholic (2007)—as well as numerous works of criticism, essays, and poetry. A Fulbright and Guggenheim fellow, he has taught at Harvard, MIT, Yale, and the University of Virginia. He lives in Massachusetts.
About Redfiend Publishing
Founded in 2020, Redfiend Publishing is dedicated to producing distinctive works of fiction, poetry, and literary scholarship. The press brings innovative, intellectually engaging literature to a broad readership.
The title figure, Maud Blessingbourne, originates in Henry James’s 1902 story “The Story in It,” where she appears as an observant and reflective reader. In this collection, the signature poem, “Maud Blessingbourne’s Temptations,” extends that portrait, so to speak, into a poetic memoir—a confession that is both condensed and deeply penetrating, almost Augustinian in its scrupulous intensity and passion. It offers a frank, quirky, yet meaningful account of a headstrong young American artist in Paris, orphaned early, tracing the contours of her vivid, self-igniting search for grace.
“The conflicts that inform a writer’s novels, stories, poems, and essays grow of course from the turmoil, the friction and reversals he or she faces in life,” says author Alexander Theroux. “Sinners commit, saints omit. Otherwise, a writer ‘writes white.’ Whatever the unavoidable truth is, that is the fortifiant, what you witness, the facts you are dealt, need recognize, and therefore must face to use. What life hands one—in aggregate—creates the drama of the poems that one is driven to write, and in a very real way actually comprises your style. A writer writes in the way a wounded cowboy bites a bullet.”
The book features original cover art drawn by the late Edward Gorey—the celebrated author and illustrator known for his distinctive fusion of elegance, absurdity, and dark humor—who was “… a good friend, a close neighbor on Cape Cod, and a frequent visitor …” of the author. The artwork, created for Theroux decades ago, now finds its natural home in this new volume of poems. “At times, way back, I quite often read Ted Gorey some of my poems,” Theroux added. “Years ago, at my house, I well recall reading him a shorter version of ‘Maud,’ since obsessive women always amused and intrigued him, while I outlined a book of poems I had put aside for years. I remember how delighted I was in his drawing the cover that I finished the signature poem that week.”
This collection is a fund of lyric poems, ballads, novels-in-stories, dramatic monologues, sonnets, and elegies.
Availability
Maud Blessingbourne’s Temptations and Other Poems is now available in hardcover through Amazon. Paperback and eBook editions will follow. A limited number of autographed first-edition hardcovers with custom-designed bookplates are available directly from Redfiend Publishing.
About the Author
Alexander Theroux is the author of four acclaimed novels—Three Wogs (1972), Darconville’s Cat (1982), An Adultery (1987), and Laura Warholic (2007)—as well as numerous works of criticism, essays, and poetry. A Fulbright and Guggenheim fellow, he has taught at Harvard, MIT, Yale, and the University of Virginia. He lives in Massachusetts.
About Redfiend Publishing
Founded in 2020, Redfiend Publishing is dedicated to producing distinctive works of fiction, poetry, and literary scholarship. The press brings innovative, intellectually engaging literature to a broad readership.
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Redfiend Publishing
Madan Jagernauth
561-501-1567
www.redfiendpub.com
Madan Jagernauth
561-501-1567
www.redfiendpub.com
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