Mehr lesen
Informationen zum Autor Louis Zukofsky spent forty-sixyears writing his masterwork "A," and died beforehe could see the completed versionpublished. Poet, translator, fictionwriter, essayist, anthologist, critic, teacher, WPA worker, and bindingforce of the Objectivist poets, Zukofsky was born in New York Cityand lived in or near the city hiswhole life. Klappentext Zukofsky (1904-78) is the great musician of difficulty in the American modernist band: words, in his poetry, are motes of magnetized dust swirling in light. His prose is slighter, best enjoyed on the terms of the rather precious connoisseurship it demands. The major work here is the novella, "Little," about a child prodigy modeled after Zukofsky's own violin virtuoso son, Paul (who provides an afterword here). It's a fey and airy piece, funny for its Yiddish-based names - von Chulnt, Verchadet, Dreykup (a portrait of Ezra Pound) - and its light comedy supporting the trials of art-making among the vulgarians. But story or character is less than secondary: what Zukofsky the poet stays solely interested in here are the turns in the course of any given sentence-"He saw a frail lady uppermost in mauve gauze, head wobbling at first, cheeks rouged into two small suns that with the frenzied decisiveness of a pinwheel on its stick whirred quickly past three oblivious parishoners to the seat beside him." Bagatelles. (Kirkus Reviews) Zusammenfassung Best known as one of the most significant poets of the 20th century, Louis Zukofsky was also an accomplished writer of fiction, all of which is collected here for the first time. Included is his only novel, "Little" (1970), which John Leonard in the "New York Times" called "an odd, playful, thoroughly charming novel about a child prodigy." (The novel is very autobiographical and Zukofsky's son, violin virtuoso, Paul Zukofsky, has written an afterword for this edition.) Also included are the four stories comprising "It Was," published in 1961 in a limited edition and virtually unobtainable for years. The stories range from the brief title story in which a writer struggles with the composition of the perfect sentence to the novella length "Ferdinand," which Guy Davenport praised in the "New York Times Book Review" as "a finely tuned story from a sensibility of extraordinary range and skill."...
