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At this age, I know who it is I want to read―though, really, have I read all of Shakespeare or Dickens or (any of) Balzac? Should I? I have not read the bulk of Proust even―prochaine, prochaine. So it is Beckett. I just don't know why. The dedicated Beckett reading began as I waited out the publication of my first book of stories. These stories were much about identity and adoption and fathers and heirs both literary and otherwise and I did not know what the book's reception would tell me about myself―I would have to wait and see. I sometimes think I don't like waiting but the opposite is true―I find waiting for something inherently exciting―and waiting for a book to be published is particularly exquisite; I even find waiting for something miserable, like, say, a colonoscopy, a luxury, as every day that is not the dreaded day has a certain satin lining. Even so, during such an interim as prepublication represents, I was concerned about having a focus to my activities.
....As I woke up each day anticipating an eventual book launch, and readings and a party and, god willing, reviews, I didn't want to make it up each day, my reading that is. I wanted to have decided that already, to have had it decided. One of the things I learned in writing my short fiction was to interrogate what a given story is about. This often helped me shape it―or abandon it. So as I plunged into my Beckett reading two summers ago, rereading James Knowlson's biography, and Beckett's early stories, and a book about the diaries he kept while in Germany in the late 1930s, I asked myself this question: Why Beckett? In the ensuing months I have chased that ball, let me tell you. For example, I was convinced I had discovered that Beckett was the father of an American writer, which promised to be a shocking revelation, not only to those who understand Beckett as having such insight into life's lack of meaning that he would never bring another being into it―"They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night," says Pozzo in Godot―but a shock as well to the Beckett estate: a sole "heir of the body?" I became transfixed by the work of this American writer, little known broadly but admired and respected by a certain avant-garde, here and in Europe. Her work is marked by a deep engagement with a purely American―indeed New England―tradition of puritanism filtered through a metaphysics of writing, feminism, and the spiritual extremism of a historic poetics convinced of God's Immanence. This seemed to me not the polar opposite of Samuel Beckett's inherited tradition and his rebellions, but a crafted dissent. This is not me, her work declared. I am not my father's daughter. Not that father. I have another.
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Book Description Hardcover. Condition: New. Dust Jacket Condition: New. 1st Edition. First printing 2018. 206pp. Bright, clean & tight copy, unread, in NEW condition. "A baseball game. Officially sanctioned torture. A chance encounter at a bar. A conversation between a parent and child. News reports of terrorist attacks. [] These--plus a meditation on the transformative power of the undying work of Samuel Beckett--make up the interwoven strands of this short work by poet and critic Michael Coffey. Written according to a sequence laid out by Beckett in his notes to the unpublished 'Long Observation of the Ray,' of which only six manuscript pages exist, this rhythm of themes and genres comprises a complex, mesmerizing work of fiction that has its roots in reality." [jacket copy] "In his new book--part memoir, part criticism, and part poetry--Michael Coffey deftly weaves multiple voices into a fractured but unified whole that strongly resonates with the digital age. Highly addictive, fiercely challenging, and lusciously readable--if you ever wondered what Beckett might sound like in the twenty-first century, this is it."--Kenneth Goldsmith. "Coffey joins Beckett in a ghostly collaboration . . . a rewarding challenge. . . . Coffey takes 'a colossal figure' whose 'form-shattering masterpieces' can seem hermetic and obscure, deliberately closed off, and opens him up in a way we haven't seen."--The New York Times. "By breaking rules of genre and narrative, by embracing experimental form, Coffey's work raises questions about how contemporary artists might work to resist the status quo through a subversive, fragmentary style that makes it impossible for us to look away from our political reality. Now, more than ever, we have much to learn from Beckett."-- Los Angeles Review of Books. Pristine & handy as New hardcover w/brilliant corners & crisp edges, a square & tight binding, wrapped in an intact jacket illustrated with a Marcel Duchamp image. Seller Inventory # RUB2838
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