About this item
Highlights
- Excerpts from Russell Edson's first novel, Gulping's Recital, appeared in The Moderns: An Anthology of New World Writing, edited by Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones at the time) and published by Corinth Books in 1963.
- Author(s): Russell Edson
- 140 Pages
- Fiction + Literature Genres, Humorous
Description
About the Book
First-ever resissue of GULPING'S RECITAL, the humorous, somewhat absurd, and somewhat surreal first novel by Russell Edson (1929-2014), "the godfather of the prose poem in America."Book Synopsis
Excerpts from Russell Edson's first novel, Gulping's Recital, appeared in The Moderns: An Anthology of New World Writing, edited by Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones at the time) and published by Corinth Books in 1963. That was a year prior to the New Directions publication of Edson's breakthrough collection of prose poems, The Very Thing That Happens. In the "Notes on the Authors" section at the back of The Moderns, it stated "Jonathan Williams' Jargon Press is scheduled to bring out the complete Gulping's Recital." For reasons unknown, the Jargon Press edition never materialized and it wasn't until 1984 that Gulping's Recital was finally published, by the small press Guignol Books in Rhinebeck, NY.
This first-ever reissue of Gulping's Recital is published with permission from the Estate of Russell Edson.
Review Quotes
"Russell Edson is the great comic poet of America. He give us hilarity of events and of people that has turned conventional truths on their respective heads to be seen in new brilliant forms. He is the master of the inappropriate and it is all done magically."
-- David Ignatow
"... one of those originals who appear out of the lonesomeness of a vast, thronged country to create a peculiar and defined world ... a world seen as through the wrong end of a spyglass, minuscule but singularly clear."
-- Denise Levertov
"What makes reading [Edson] a lasting a worthwhile pleasure is the eccentricity of his vision, his freedom in intermingling objective and subjective realities, his grotesque view of our civilization (or, perhaps, better but, his view of our grotesque civilization), and his wonderful sense of humor."
-- Ira Sadoff, Seneca Review