
This title will be released on
February 18, 2025
Description
This is a book that contains multitudes--a celebration of the forgotten marginalia of Westernized thought. Persson's collection delves into eccentric twentieth-century American photographers, the lives of his ancestors both distant and recent, and of the artist Egon Schiele in prison, teetering on the edge of sanity. He interweaves the careers of three obscure composers--Alban Berg, Erik Satie, and Anton Webern--and imagines the composer's life based on listening to their music, rather than the other way around. And he charts the path of his own life from a long-ago teenage road trip, sleeping in the backs of friends' cars and trying to find himself inside a vast world.
As the work builds, the lines between personal memory and collective history become ever more abstract, blending inner and outer spheres to confront the unknowable expanse of universal existence. A must-read for fans of Michael Ondaatje's The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida, and W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz.
This work includes black-and-white reproductions of Egon Schiele's drawings, with permission from The ALBERTINA Museum in Vienna.
Product Details
Publisher | Dzanc Books |
Publish Date | February 18, 2025 |
Pages | 146 |
Language | English |
Type | |
EAN/UPC | 9781938603228 |
Dimensions | 8.5 X 5.5 X 0.6 inches | 0.5 pounds |
About the Author
Reviews
-Tom Jeffreys, editor of Walking: Documents of Contemporary Art and author of The White Birch"By turns tender, erudite, and uncanny, the frequently biographical pieces collected here cover a lot of ground, from European composers to the history of the earth through road trips and onomastics. Haunted by undying dead fathers and ever drowning Ophelias, they are beautifully haunting. Russell Persson is a true original--a latter-day alchemist, transmuting prosaic prose into unalloyed poetry. No one else writes like this; his style is sui generis."-Andrew Gallix, author of Unwords
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