0

    Alfred and Guinevere

    by James Schuyler, John Ashbery (Introduction), Harry Zohn (Translator)


    Paperback

    $13.45
    $13.45
     $14.95 | Save 10%

    Temporarily Out of Stock Online

    Customer Reviews

    James Schuyler (1923–1991) was a preeminent figure in the celebrated New York School of poets. He grew up in Washington, D.C., and near Buffalo, New York. After World War II, he made his way to Italy, where he served for a time asW.H. Auden’s secretary. His books include three novels, A Nest of Ninnies (written with John Ashbery), Alfred and Guinevere, and What’s For Dinner, as well as numerous volumes of poetry.

    John Ashbery is the author of twenty books of poetry, includingSelf-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975), which received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award; and Some Trees (1956), which was selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Series. He has also published art criticism, plays, and a novel. Ashbery is currently the Charles P. Stevenson, Jr., Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College.

    Read More

    What People are Saying About This

    Kenneth Koch

    Prose as poetry really should be: among other things fresh, surprising, artful, and clear. . .I laughed all through [Alfred and Guinevere] for three readings in a row--and wholeheartedly, as one can only laugh at something that is also beautiful.

    Eligible for FREE SHIPPING details

    .

    One of the finest American poets of the second half of the twentieth century, James Schuyler was at the same time a remarkable novelist. Alfred and Guinevere are two children who have been sent by their parents to spend the summer at their grandmother's house in the country. There they puzzle over their parents' absence and their relatives' habits, play games and pranks, make friends and fall out with them, spat and make up. Schuyler has a pitch-perfect ear for the children's voices, and the story, told entirely through snatches of dialogue and passages from Guinevere's diary, is a tour de force of comic and poetic invention. The reader discovers that beneath the book's apparently guileless surface lies a very sophisticated awareness of the complicated ways in which words work to define the often perilous boundaries between fantasy and reality, innocence and knowledge.

    Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought

    • What's for Dinner?
      by James SchuylerJames McCourt
      Average rating: 0.0 Average rating:
    • Nights in the Gardens of…
      by Harvey SwadosGrace Paley
      Average rating: 0.0 Average rating:
    • Doting
      by Henry GreenMichael Gorra
      Average rating: 0.0 Average rating:
    • Nothing
      by Henry GreenFrancine Prose
      Average rating: 0.0 Average rating:
    • Havoc
      by Tom KristensenCarl MalmbergMaxmilian
      Average rating: 0.0 Average rating:
    • The Furies (New York Review…
      by Janet HobhouseDaphne Merkin
      Average rating: 0.0 Average rating:
    • Mawrdew Czgowchwz
      by James McCourtWayne Koestenbaum
      Average rating: 0.0 Average rating:
    • Blindness
      by Henry GreenDaniel Mendelsohn
      Average rating: 0.0 Average rating:
    • The Juniper Tree
      by Barbara ComynsSadie Stein
      Average rating: 0.0 Average rating:
    • Candy
      by Terry SouthernMason Hoffenberg
      Average rating: 3.6 Average rating:
    • Jigsaw
      by Sybille BedfordSybille Bedford
      Average rating: 0.0 Average rating:
    • Memoirs of Hecate County ( New…
      by Edmund WilsonLouis Menand
      Average rating: 0.0 Average rating:
    • Belchamber
      by Howard SturgisE. M. ForsterEdmund White
      Average rating: 3.0 Average rating:
    • The Collected Fiction of…
      by Francis WyndhamAlan Hollinghurst
      Average rating: 0.0 Average rating:

    Recently Viewed 

    From the Publisher
    "The novel…is quite an extraordinary piece of work, chronicling an uneasy period in the life of a brother and sister, seven—year—old Alfred and 11—year—old Guinevere." — Michael Hofmann, London Review of Books

    "A delectable little book…A deft and funny creation of a high quality somewhere between the terror—haunted humor of Richard Hughes’ A High Wind in Jamaica and the placid, presumably unself—conscious amusements of Daisy Ashford’s The Young Visiters." — Commonweal

    "Schuyler, who died in 1991, was a noted poet, however this book is not written in 'poetic prose'—he employs a simple style, without imagery or complexities. But every page displays a poet’s sensibility in the fresh and inventive ways Schuyler has his child narrators use and misuse language.Alfred and Guinevere is a small treasure, and its restoration to print is to be commended." — Phillip Routh, Rain Taxi Review of Books

    "You can hear it now — for, in dialogue form, (except when Guinevere Gates is writing in her diary) here are the skirmishes, the misadventures and mishaps, and the troubles that she and her younger brother Alfred get into in their city home…" — Kirkus Reviews
    Commonweal
    A delectable little book. . .A deft and funny creation of a high quality somewhere between the terror-haunted humor of Richard Hughes¹s A High Wind in Jamaica and the placid, presumably unself-conscious amusements of Daisy Ashford¹s The Young Visiters.
    Amy Gerstler
    This lovely first book by New York School poet James Schuyler was out of pring for more htan forty years. Its reappearance is cause for quiet celebration...Alfred and Guinevere could be viewed as an experimental novel, though it is eminently accessible. Wistful and intimate, the book is written in a kind of literature verité...I recommend reading this brief novel twice so that the resonance of its mastery of the bernacular, its humor and submerged drama, have a chance to bloom in the mind.
    Bookforum

    Read More

    Sign In Create an Account
    Search Engine Error - Endeca File Not Found