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Leafless American and Other Writings (Paperback, New edition)
Loot Price: R270
Discovery Miles 2 700
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Leafless American and Other Writings (Paperback, New edition)
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Loot Price R270
Discovery Miles 2 700
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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Boston-born Dahlberg (1900-1977), an immensely high-flown essayist
beside whom Emerson can seem earthbound, first made his name as a
social realist with the novels Bottom Dogs (1929) and From Flushing
to Calvary (1932), then retired to his massive book collection,
became a classicist, renounced his novels and collected his essays
in widely known but unread volumes such as Can These Bones Live?,
The Flea of Sodom and The Sorrows of Priapus, not publishing
another novel for 30 years. Many readers, straining at a vocabulary
seemingly belonging to a 500-year-old man, may wish he'd never left
fiction. The 12 essays and two long poems herein are typical of his
work, as is this passage from "A Decline of Souls": "'A great city
is. . .a great solitude,' said Aristotle, and so is a small town.
Observe the funerary rites of a marred, touchless shopper in a
self-service market: each customer is a sepulchral orphan: he walks
and talks to himself. When he approaches the cashier and gives her
the money for what he has bought, she drops the change into the
palm of his exiled hand without grazing the skin. This is supposed
to be market-place sanitation. But people must exchange each
other's germs or expire of the worms of Herod." Your ignorance of
the worms of Herod is not Dahlberg's worry. Among the rugged peaks
in this short chain of essays (reprinted from a 1967 volume) are
his prayer to the American earth, "The Leafless American"; a review
of man's sexual nature and mortality, "The Sandals of Judith";
essays on Stephen Crane, Sherwood Anderson, Oscar Wilde and
Nietzsche; a moving essay on returning home to a city he hated
("Kansas City Revisited"); and two skewerings of his critics and
reviewers, "How Do You Spell Fool?" and "The Malice of Witlings."
Without question, the chief work here is the magnificent long poem
"The Garment of Ra," which embodies a lifetime of reading in simple
diction and cadences. Up from cult. (Kirkus Reviews)
General
Imprint: |
McPherson & Co Publishers,U.S.
|
Country of origin: |
United States |
Release date: |
November 1986 |
Authors: |
Edward Dahlberg
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Dimensions: |
210 x 146 x 13mm (L x W x T) |
Format: |
Paperback
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Pages: |
128 |
Edition: |
New edition |
ISBN-13: |
978-0-914232-80-3 |
Categories: |
Books
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LSN: |
0-914232-80-0 |
Barcode: |
9780914232803 |
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