The modern world's embarrassing, cringe-worthy, candid memoir-as-novel that dumps upon an ex-lover/spouse is nothing new. In 1931, Jack Kahane, a writer of novels that nobody read, launched Obelisk Press. In a few years the imprint would gain international notoriety for publishing Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. In the interim, it stayed afloat with racy fluff such as Daffodil by Cecil Barr (Kahane’s pseudonym), one of the imprint’s best-selling titles.But before Kahane got Obelisk Press off the ground he had to get Henri Babou off his back.He had entered into an agreement with Babou, “a short, well-groomed Frenchman with a goatee...
