Here & Elsewhere: The Collected Fiction of Kenneth Burke

Stated First Edition. A Black Sparrow Book. Bright, clean & tight copy, unread in NEW condition. "Before he turned to criticism and became the American Coleridge, Kenneth Burke was a writer of fiction. His avant-garde short stories were unlike any others of the 1920s; indeed, stories even remotely like them would not come along for decades. Not for Burke the stripped-down language of Hemingway or the topical social satire of Fitzgerald; instead he was intent on constructing rhetorically gorgeous 'peopled essays' that anticipated, by nearly half a century, the work of Calvino, Gass and Nicholson Baker. More precisely, Burke appropriated for modernism the forgotten formal modes---and the bawdy comic verve---of Tristram Shandy and Candide. His characters are thinkers, not doers; they lament, rejoice, beseech, admonish, aphorize, and inveigh in the manner of a Greenwich Village Samuel Johnson. The centerpiece is TOWARDS A BETTER LIFE (1932), a series of grave, malicious epistles by John Neal, a worldly ascetic and philosophical dandy." Pristine copy w/sharp corners & crisp edges, square binding, no creases in spine. Quite presentable.…