Revagations: 1966-1974
Revagations: 1966-1974

Author: Eric Basso

Publisher: Leaping Dog Press/Asylum

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 460

ISBN-13:

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Cultural Writing. Biography and memoir. Eric Basso began to record his dreams in 1966, at the age of nineteen. REVAGATIONS is the first of three projected volumes. In these pages, we dicover an unconscious life laid bare in a myriad of bizarre adventures and intrigues. Whether he's dancing with Ginger Rogers, buying secondhand books from Adolf Hitler or narrating the strange history of the mutant Bazillia, Basso's imagery is always vivid, direct, sometimes poetic, at other time hilariously funny and, more often than not, brazenly politically incorrect. The first volume is preceded by Basso's diverting survey of the role played by dreams in art, literature, music and sciences.

The Comedy of Agony
The Comedy of Agony

Author: Christopher Spranger

Publisher: Leaping Dog Press/Asylum

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 144

ISBN-13: 1587750236

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Cultural Writing. Philosophy and Religion. Poetry. Christopher Spranger describes THE COMEDY OF AGONY: A BOOK OF POISONOUS CONTEMPLATIONS as an attempt to rewrite Dante's Divine Comedy while leaving out the word "God." The result is a series of short, aphorism-like pieces that become as humorous as they are dismal. "A life without suffering belongs to the same order of ideas as a soup without broth.We are accustomed to talk about catastrophe as if it were an unwelcome guest and not a secretly wished-for deliverance from the tedium of life." Spranger's first book, THE EFFORT TO FALL, is also available from SPD.

Decompositions
Decompositions

Author: Eric Basso

Publisher: Leaping Dog Press/Asylum

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13:

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Literary Criticism. Art Criticism. DECOMPOSITIONS collects Eric Basso's essay on art and literature in one volume. In the pivotal essay "Annihilation," Basso takes a short story by a forgotten Hungarian writer as the springboard to a searing dissection of Rembrandt, alchemy, Stephane Mallarme, Edgar Allan Poe and Rene Daumal, closing with a new interpretation of Kafka's The Castle. Eric Basso "remains one of the most interesting writers in the country, someone whose work does not fit conveniently into categories.but whose poetry, fiction and dramatic writing extend our sense of what terms like modernism and postmodernism mean"-Stephen-Paul Martin.

Rumi's Mathnavi
Rumi's Mathnavi

Author: Joe Martin

Publisher: Leaping Dog Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 124

ISBN-13:

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Drama. In conjunction with UNESCO's designation of 2007 as the Year of Rumi, the Asylum Arts imprint of Leaping Dog Press has released Joe Martin's (Yousef Daoud's) stage adaptation of Rumi's Mathnavi. For ten years, Rumi has been the best selling poet in America. But until now, most English speakers have found it almost impossible to get a sense of the world of his greatest work, the Mathnavi. This Asylum Arts edition of Joe Martin's dramatic adaptation aims to provide that opportunity. This edition will give a wide audience an authentic taste of Rumi's six-volume work, in a reader's edition, accompanied by photographs from the 2005 production of the play.

Burn & Learn, Or, Memoirs of the Cenozoic Era
Burn & Learn, Or, Memoirs of the Cenozoic Era

Author: Eric Paul Shaffer

Publisher:

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 428

ISBN-13: 9781587750281

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Burn & Learn is a wild tale of five friends attending college, drinking coffee at the Frontier Restaurant, and learning the wisdom of the ages, the era, and the street in Albuquerque, New Mexico. This episodic novel begins where Laurence Sterne and Richard Brautigan left off, introducing a truly amusing and alluring wilderness of words through which readers can blaze their own glorious trials. The novel reveals all in thirteen modes ranging from mythology, science-fiction fables, American koans, Coyote tales, BookMovie chapters, missing lists, realistic narrative, encyclopedic entries enumerating the details of the Century of Technological Disaster, a love story, a lost-love story, and parables of four monkish brothers residing in a cabin on the Continental Divide. The novel encompasses all time from the beginning to the end of the universe and examines everything through the brief, flickering frames of 167 short chapters.

The Beak Doctor
The Beak Doctor

Author: Eric Basso

Publisher: Leaping Dog Press/Asylum

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13:

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Fiction. [Eric Basso] remains one of the most interesting writers in the country, someone whose work does not fit conveniently into categories like metafiction or language-centered poetry, but whose poetry, fiction and dramatic writing extend our sense of what terms like modernism and postmodernism mean -- Stephen-Paul Martin. THE BEAK DOCTOR, concluding this collection of five short stories, was first published in The Chicago Review in 1977 and has enjoyed a cult reputation among a core of avant-garde writers. The book begins with a tale of death and hideous resurrection, and concludes with the harrowing odyssey of a masked man (the Beak Doctor) in a fogbound city turned upside down by a plague of sleeping sickness.

Bartholomew Fair
Bartholomew Fair

Author: Eric Basso

Publisher: Leaping Dog Press/Asylum

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 164

ISBN-13:

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Fiction. Set in London during a killing heat wave, Eric Basso's 1982 novel, BARTHOLOMEW FAIR, unfolds as a terrible cataclysm is about to devastate the city. Begun in the Middle Ages as a religious festival in commemoration of St. Bartholomew the Great, over the centuries Bartholomew Fair passed through several metamorphoses. Now it has gone underground. Its lone survivor recounts the story of the Fair's final, sordid incarnation, and the bizarre odyssey which brings him face-to-face with the unspeakable. Rich in texture and atmosphere, this extraordinary novel is also a stylistic tour de force, in which the history of Bartholomew Fair, whose long-dead voices come to life in these pages, haunts the clandestine activities of its modern-day performers and their obsessed patrons.

The Golem Triptych
The Golem Triptych

Author: Eric Basso

Publisher:

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 408

ISBN-13:

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Completed in 1983, this mesmerizing dramatic trilogy is destined to take its place beside The Playboy of the Western World, Waiting for Godot and The Homecoming as a classic of the modern theatre. Always surprising, witty and intelligent, Basso's plays move gracefully through both history and the history of theatre, incorporating at times the slapstick of Ionesco, the brooding heaviness of Ibsen, the passion, language and scope of the great Elizabethan dramatists. A powerfully moving odyssey, a transmutation of language from base metal to gold, a work of grandeur and pity.

Catafalques
Catafalques

Author: Eric Basso

Publisher: Leaping Dog Press/Asylum

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13:

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Poetry. With CATAFALQUES, Eric Basso plunges deeper, and more dangerously, into the interior distance he began to explore in his previous book, THE SMOKING MIRROR. Haunted by a sense of loss and foreboding, this fourth collection is rich in poems that raise the quiet mutiny against a withering cosmos. A dark magic works here, sustained by poetry that is often complex, ironic, disquieting, impassioned, and sometimes even wildly comic. The poet's resonant voice convokes a cycle of spellbinding images, both concrete and elusive, that are indeed flares burning in the counterfeit night.

Umbra
Umbra

Author: Eric Basso

Publisher: Asylum Arts Publishing

Published: 2009-11

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 9781878580726

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After completing his first collection of poems, Accidental Monsters, in six months, Eric Basso immediately began Umbra, which he finished on the eve of his thirtieth birthday. It is a poet's giant notebook, a laboratory for almost daily experiment with form and image. Many of the poems here read as extended haiku, others record fleeting visions, fluctuating states of mind, dwarfed mysteries of intrigue and sudden loss, brief comedies, or simply moments of heightened perception, all fixed like flies in amber. In this early collection, Basso unabashedly offers the reader poems written without a net. For anyone who wishes to look behind the curtain, Umbra is an indispensable document.