Catchin' the Drift O' the Draft - Softcover

Louis Daniel Brodsky; L.D. Brodsky

9781568090528: Catchin' the Drift O' the Draft

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1568090528 ISBN 13: 9781568090528

Publisher: Time Being Books, 1999

When you enter L.D. Brodsky’s Catchin’ the Drift o’ the Draft, you find yourself in the surreal world of a master satirist. Imagine staring into a mirror and recognizing your reflection as that of a chimpanzee, before you swing to work on a vine, or consider the possibility that you and your spouse are the newest additions to the ape house at the zoo, where your every move is being scrutinized.

Prepare yourself for Brodsky’s auto factory-assembly-line worker from south St. Louis, who takes the stage in six pieces that set up a chronological continuity around which the other fictions swirl. His humor is boisterous, whimsical, condemnatory, at times even self-deprecating, his language a study in fractured English that nonetheless debunks conventional wisdom and political correctness, exposing the cant and hypocrisy of 1990s America.

These fast-paced fictions, about persons bedeviled by phobias and physical afflictions arising from the realities of old age, racism, and too-rapid change, are pieces of life that examine the world and revel in its absurdities. If Jonathan Swift, Franz Kafka, and Richard Brautigan could collaborate, the result might be Catchin’ the Drift o’ the Draft, a highly original, satirical, and altogether entertaining collection of forty-one short short fictions. Delight in them.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author:

Louis Daniel Brodsky was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1941, where he attended St. Louis Country Day School. After earning a B.A., magna cum laude, at Yale University in 1963, he received an M.A. in English from Washington University in 1967 and an M.A. in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University the following year.

From 1968 to 1987, while continuing to write poetry, he assisted in managing a 350-person men's clothing factory in Farmington, Missouri, and started one of the Midwest's first factory-outlet apparel chains. From 1980 to 1991, he taught English and creative writing at Mineral Area Junior College, in nearby Flat River. Since 1987, he has lived in St. Louis and devoted himself to composing poems. He has a daughter and a son.

Brodsky is the author of fifty-one volumes of poetry (five of which have been published in French by �ditions Gallimard) and twenty-two volumes of prose, including nine books of scholarship on William Faulkner and six books of short fictions. His poems and essays have appeared in Harper's, The Faulkner Review, Southern Review, Texas Quarterly, National Forum, American Scholar, Studies in Bibliography, Kansas Quarterly, Ball State University's Forum, Cimarron Review, and Literary Review, as well as in Ariel, Acumen, Orbis, New Welsh Review, Dalhousie Review, and other journals. His work has also been printed in five editions of the Anthology of Magazine Verse and Yearbook of American Poetry. The Center for Great Lakes Culture, at Michigan State University, selected You Can't Go Back, Exactly for its 2004 award for best book of poetry.

Review:

Those who’ve enjoyed L.D. Brodsky’s poems over the years will find new pleasures and insights in his fictions. -- William Wiegand, author of The Chester A. Arthur Conspiracy

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.