Description
Temporarily out of stock
Title: These Possible Lives
Author: JAEGGY FLEUR
Format: PAPERBACK
Publication date: 15/08/2017
Imprint: NORTON
Price: $21.95
Publishing status: Active
New Directions is proud to present Fleur Jaeggy’s strange and mesmerizing essays about the writers Thomas De Quincey, John Keats, and Marcel Schwob. A renowned stylist of hyper-brevity in fiction, Fleur Jaeggy proves herself an even more concise master of the essay form, albeit in a most peculiar and lapidary poetic vein. Of De Quincey’s early nineteenth-century world we hear of the habits of writers: Charles Lamb \”spoke of ‘Lilliputian rabbits’ when eating frog fricassse\”; Henry Fuseli \”ate a diet of raw meat in order to obtain splendid dreams\”; \”Hazlitt was perceptive about musculature and boxers\”; and \”Wordsworth used a buttery knife to cut the pages of a first-edition Burke.\” In a book of \”blue devils\” and night visions, the Keats essay opens: \”In 1803, the guillotine was a common child’s toy.\” And poor Schwob’s end comes as he feels \”like a ‘dog cut open alive’\”: \”His face colored slightly, turning into a mask of gold. His eyes stayed open imperiously. No one could shut his eyelids. The room smoked of grief.\” Fleur Jaeggy’s essays-or are they prose poems?-smoke of necessity: the pages are on fire.
ISBN: 9780811226875
Weight: 70g
Dimension: 178mm X 127mm
Pages: 64
Edition: 01