An innovative work of speculative fiction, Jeff Alessandrelli's AND YET interrogates contemporary shyness, selfhood and sexual mores, drawing out the particulars of each through personal history, cultural commentary and the author's own restless imagination. AND YET builds off the work of authors as disparate as Michel Leiris, Marguerite Duras and Kobo Abe, while quoting from and alluding to texts by Susan Sontag, Young Thug, Young Jean Lee, Cesare Pavese, Sylvia Plath and Louise Gl¸ck, among others. At the same time, however, AND YET is entirely itself, with a nameless, self-questioning millennial protagonist simultaneously proud and afraid of his formidable interiority. "Love is a thing full of anxious fear," especially when what you ultimately love and fear is your self," writes Alessandrelli, and AND YET draws such a notion down, out and around again, finally arriving at its own idiosyncratic answers.
"AND YET asks, what might be gained or lost from living one's life via text instead of directly participating in the world? Through aphorism, anecdote, observation, and personal narrative, Alessandrelli examines the complex entanglements of sexuality and desire. A profound and concise work of self-construction."-- Patrick Cottrell
"What I find compelling about AND YET is its Leirisian insistence on the 'unattenuated crudity' of candid self-disclosure as it juggles its intellectual bricolage and its generational concerns with its speculative fictional narrative. Amid meditations on quotations revealing a fairly individual reading sensibility--Cyril Connolly!--AND YET nonetheless takes on the momentum of a pageturner; I found myself wondering, 'What'll happen to the poor bastard? Will I still like him at the end?' like I was reading a thriller instead of a hybrid whuzzit investigating millennial dilemmas of sex, gender, and intimacy, one written in the grand tradition of poet's prose. In the immortal words of Bon Scott, 'It's harder than it looks!'"--Garrett Caples
"Composed in delicately and suggestively connected fragments, Jeff Alessandrelli's AND YET is a lyrical yet probing investigation of the nature of modern intimacy, full of heart but always meticulously thoughtful."--Joe Moran
"In Jeff Alessandrelli's AND YET, love is a song he's afraid to sing. So he finds an unnamed singer to do it for him. Memoir and fiction mix with anaphora and shyness in this book, while quotes from Sontag and Jane's Addiction, Kafka and Flight of the Conchords conjoin the text. Through short sections like bursts, AND YET contends with the sexual crap and self-involvement of "manhood" to locate self-awareness and tenderness. AND YET circles a self in conversation with a self who might learn to get free, to love, himself, just yet."--Kisha Lewellyn Schlegel
Fiction. Speculative Fiction.
Jeff Alessandrelli is most recently the author of the poetry collection FUR NOT LIGHT (2019), which The Kenyon Review called an "example of radical humility. Its poems enact a quiet but persistent empathy in the world of creative writing." An expanded version of FUR NOT LIGHT entitled Nothing of the Month Club was released in the United Kingdom in 2021. In addition to his writing, Alessandrelli also directs the nonprofit book press/record label Fonograf Editions.
