Modernism gave us Yeats and Picasso, Stravinsky and Balanchine—and it gave us Guy Davenport, perhaps its finest and most neglected heir, whose four decades of fiction, poetry, essays, and translations are collected here for the very first time
"The imagination is like the drunk man who has lost his watch, and must get drunk again to find it. It is as intimate as speech and custom, and to trace its ways we need to re–educate our eyes." —Guy Davenport
One of the last pure Modernists, Guy Davenport was perhaps the finest stylist and most protean craftsman of his generation. Publishing more than two dozen books of fiction, essays, poetry and translations over a career of more than forty years, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1990. In poetry and prose, Davenport drew upon the most archaic and the most modern of influences to create what he called "assemblages"—lush experiments that often defy classification.
Woven throughout is a radical and coherent philosophy of desire, design and human happiness. But never before has Davenport's fiction, nonfiction, poetry and translations been collected together in one compendium. Now available in a new paperback edition twenty years after his death, The Guy Davenport Reader offers a true introduction to the far–ranging work of this neglected genius.
"Guy Davenport seems comfortable in any genre... For whatever else he is, Davenport is an entertainer ... to the point of being able to take literary dullards like Kafka and Poe and turn them, too, into charming entertainers."RALPH
Guy Davenport was a writer, illustrator, teacher, and scholar. He is best known for his modernist-style short stories, but his range of works is wide, spanning poetry, translation, and criticism. He was a professor of English for three decades, having taught at Haverford College and the University of Kentucky.
Erik Reece, himself a student of Davenport and now his literary executor, is also the author of Lost Mountain, An American Gospel and Field Work.</p
Modernism gave us Yeats and Picasso, Stravinsky and Balanchine—and it gave us Guy Davenport, perhaps its finest and most neglected heir, whose four decades of fiction, poetry, essays, and translations are collected here for the very first time
"The imagination is like the drunk man who has lost his watch, and must get drunk again to find it. It is as intimate as speech and custom, and to trace its ways we need to re–educate our eyes." —Guy Davenport
One of the last pure Modernists, Guy Davenport was perhaps the finest stylist and most protean craftsman of his generation. Publishing more than two dozen books of fiction, essays, poetry and translations over a career of more than forty years, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1990. In poetry and prose, Davenport drew upon the most archaic and the most modern of influences to create what he called "assemblages"—lush experiments that often defy classification.
Woven throughout is a radical and coherent philosophy of desire, design and human happiness. But never before has Davenport's fiction, nonfiction, poetry and translations been collected together in one compendium. Now available in a new paperback edition twenty years after his death, The Guy Davenport Reader offers a true introduction to the far–ranging work of this neglected genius.
Reviews
"Guy Davenport seems comfortable in any genre... For whatever else he is, Davenport is an entertainer ... to the point of being able to take literary dullards like Kafka and Poe and turn them, too, into charming entertainers."RALPH
Author
Guy Davenport was a writer, illustrator, teacher, and scholar. He is best known for his modernist-style short stories, but his range of works is wide, spanning poetry, translation, and criticism. He was a professor of English for three decades, having taught at Haverford College and the University of Kentucky.
Erik Reece, himself a student of Davenport and now his literary executor, is also the author of Lost Mountain, An American Gospel and Field Work.</p
