Recovery

by John Berryman, Saul Bellow (Foreword by)

Overview

In the author's words, Recovery is a novel about "the disease called alcoholism, recognized by the American Medical Association only in 1964."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781466808058
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	01/01/1973
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	302 KB

About the Author

John Berryman won the Pulitzer Prize for his work 77 Dream Songs. He was the recipient of the National Book Award for His Toy, His Dream, His Rest.

John Berryman (1914-1972) was an American poet and scholar. He won the Pulitzer Prize for 77 Dream Songs in 1965 and the National Book Award and the Bollingen Prize for His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, a continuation of the Dream Songs, in 1969.

Table of Contents

Contents

Foreword: John Berryman

Saul Bellow

Higgaion

I. First Day

II. The First Step (I-IV)

III. Contract One

IV. The Last Two First Steps

V. Contract Two

VI. Self-Confronted

VII. Dry-Drunk

VIII. The Jewish Kick and the Fifth Step

Selah

Author’s Notes

The Imaginary Jew

The Twelve Steps

Editorial Reviews

"What he needed for his art had been supplied by his own person, by his mind, his wit."
—Saul Bellow, from the Foreword

"Recovery is a brilliantly written, masterful portrayal of man’s battle with himself for survival."—Chicago Sun-Times

"What distinguishes Recovery from many fine and powerful fictions about alcoholism are the steps it takes into allegory and art."—Los Angeles Times

"The powerful statement of a man who was there and never came back."—Kirkus Reviews

"But if Recovery is a fragment, it is a dazzling fragment, every bit as rich and macaberesquely comic as anything in Berryman’s better known poems."—The Independent

"Page after page, it displays humiliations and defeats. His novel, while written in prose, has the effect of a poem about the desolation of total selfpunishment. Sometimes, not even God and AA, acting in concert, can help with that."—National Post

From the Publisher