Collected Works Volume Three 1987-1997

Metcalf, Paul

ISBN 10: 1566890624 / ISBN 13: 9781566890625

Published by Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, 1997

About this Item

Introduction by Guy Davenport.

Seller Inventory # 9026330

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Collected Works Volume Three 1987-1997
• Publisher: Coffee House Press, Minneapolis
• Publication Date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1566890624
• ISBN 13: 9781566890625
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st.
• Condition: fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: fine
• Seller catalogs:
  • Literature
  • Book

About this title

Synopsis

This volume completes the collected works of an American genius that Coffee House has helped rediscover.

Reviews

It is an interstate highway, a backbone, the dividing line between sanity and schizophrenia, a place within which to collect endless pathologies, "not a poem, not a novel, not a history, not a journal, yet at times some or all of these." It is, in other words, the second volume of Metcalf's Collected Works (see LJ 11/15/96 for a review of the first installment), an odd, exhilarating hybrid of a text somehow "based" on Interstate 57. In his method, Metcalf reminds us that the world is endlessly interesting; whatever is gleaned, even the strange or banal, matters to a story largely taken up in the interstices. An epic may be constructed solely out of place names from the 1968 U.S. Postal Service Zip Code Directory ("Zip Odes"); 19th-century mustachioed actors and any number of other associations may connect the stories of Poe and John Wilkes Booth; volcanic eruptions, invasions, and attacks and counterattacks are fabulously juxtaposed to comprise the record of Martinique?all of it threatening to overcome any notion of a legitimate, received history. Metcalf's project has been solitary and glacial in its undertaking, but readers would be at a serious deficit without it.?Steven R. Ellis, Pennsylvania State Univ. Libs., University Park
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