The Book - Softcover

Ruefle, Mary

Softcover

ISBN 13: 9798891060043

Publisher: Wave Books, 2025

Synopsis

Following the acclaimed Dunce, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, comes Mary Ruefle’s latest prose publication The Book, now in softcover.

True to its bold title, The Book affirms Mary Ruefle’s legacy as (dubbed by Publishers Weekly) “the patron saint of childhood and the everyday.”  With the same curiosity found in Madness, Rack, and Honey and My Private Property, Ruefle’s prose here feels both omniscient and especially intimate. “It seems I believe in a bygone world though I no longer live there,” she writes. “Will I continue to read about all that is dusty?” In the spirit of friendship, Ruefle generously invites us to query ourselves as readers and thinkers in a world that will eventually endure without us.

About this title

About the Author

Mary Ruefle is the author of many books, including, most recently, The Book (September 2023) along with Dunce  (Wave Books, 2019), which was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize, longlisted for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, as well as a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize. She is also the author of My Private Property (Wave Books, 2016), Trances of the Blast (Wave Books, 2013), Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures (Wave Books, 2012), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and Selected Poems (Wave Books, 2010), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. She has also published a comic book, Go Home and Go to Bed! (Pilot Books/Orange Table Comics, 2007), and is an erasure artist, whose treatments of nineteenth century texts have been exhibited in museums and galleries and published in A Little White Shadow (Wave Books, 2006). Ruefle is the recipient of numerous honors, including the Robert Creeley Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Whiting Award. She lives in Bennington, Vermont, where she serves as the state’s poet laureate.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Untitled

 

 

About this time I began to suspect I was never named; people called me Mary because it was convenient, or because they had heard others call me Mary, I was in the beginning named after someone else who was named Mary but I was neither this person nor the one they called Mary after her, I was nameless, and in this state I perpetually wandered among fruit and flowers and foliage, among vines and overhanging rock and untamed animals, none of whom I could name, none of whom knew my name, nor, if they did, could they speak it.  I read once that the Amazon was called the Green Hell, and if that is a name, I take it, if only as a substitute for my unknown name, which not even my parents knew when they named me Mary, after a woman who scrubbed her kitchen floor on her hands and knees, once a week, with a stiff brush.  She was kind to me and I loved her, and since her death I have dreamt of her many times, either searching for her or speaking to her, but never once in my dreams have I called her Mary, which, I suspect, is not her name, or if it once was, is no longer.

Edition details

• Publisher: Wave Books
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 13: 9798891060043
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 112