Experts Are Puzzled - Softcover

Riding, Laura

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1937027864 ISBN 13: 9781937027865

Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018

Synopsis

Fiction. Edited by George Fragopoulos. Introduction by Mark Jacobs and George Fragopoulos. A nearly impossible text to categorize--is it a collection of short stories, prose poems, manifestos or something else entirely?--EXPERTS ARE PUZZLED is one of Laura Riding's earliest and most intense examinations of poetry's and language's relationship to truth. In essayistic examinations such as the titular piece, "Introduction to a book on Money," and "An Address to America," Riding seeks to articulate a higher, more poetic notion of truth and truth telling, a project that would later result in her famous renunciation of poetry itself. As such, EXPERTS ARE PUZZLED stands as an essential text in better understanding why it is that Riding rejected poetry and stopped writing it altogether in the late 1930s. While excerpts and selections from EXPERTS have been published before, most notably in Riding's The Progress of Stories, the entirety of the collection has not appeared in print since its initial publication by Jonathan Cape in 1930.

About this title

About the Author

Laura Riding was a poet, novelist, short-story writer, essayist, and publisher. While primarily known for the critical works that she co-authored with Robert Graves—A Pamphlet Against Anthologies and A Survey of Modernist Poetry—Riding also left behind an incredibly powerful body of poetry and prose works that, regrettably, remain little read today. These include The Close Chaplet, The Lives of Wives, and The Progress of Stories. Famously rejecting poetry early in her career, she spent the last decades of her life co-writing a theoretical work on linguistics, Rational Meaning, with her husband Schuyler Jackson. She was awarded the Bollingen Prize in 1991, the very same year she died.

Edition details

• Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1937027864
• ISBN 13: 9781937027865
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 144
• Editor: Fragopoulos George