Ruth, a bored and frustrated young mother in the Chicago suburbs, is haunted by the letters she receives from her own mother, who has been dead for several years. Ruth hires Lamb, whose investigation traces the letters to Europe and ultimately to Gustave, who tells the story of his equivocal love affair with a beautiful American girl during the student rebellion in Paris in 1968. But this girl is less carefree than she seems; she is an American haunted by her own half-lit memories of the unnarratable horrors of European history, and she may turn out to be Ruth’s mother, if not Ruth’s second self. 
 Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy is a darkly glamorous existential noir in the late modernist tradition of José Saramago, W.G. Sebald, Italo Calvino, and Roberto Bolaño. Written in gorgeous and elliptical prose, this electric first novel is a love story, a ghost story, and a psychological thriller about the enigma of American innocence, the fatality of storytelling, and the precarious destiny of reading itself. 
 This powerful novel, which pays out its rewards gradually, carefully, but also crisply, dare I say electrically, may be Joshua Corey’s first, but it feels exactly like the highly satisfying product of the fully formed imagination that birthed it. All of Corey’s hard-earned skill as a poet is put here to useful work. The push-pull between stunning language and inventive narrative is pure pleasure. Laird Hunt 
 Joshua Corey’s Beautiful Soul offers a swirling, shadowy cosmos lit by intelligence, urgency, and heart. Its swirl is cinematic—“estranged and operatic”—but never at the expense of the body, be it the bitten nipple, or the “bloody middle” of history. I especially admire Corey’s conjuring of Ruth: fulcrum of readerly empathy, inheritor of mysterious and difficult histories, navigator of the present’s strata, honorary “new reader.” Go on her journey with her; “the book is waiting.” Maggie Nelson 
 All the beauty of the world is in the flow of each living person’s narrative, from moment to moment, and the way these stories also encompass the ghosts of the past—this is the angle of incidence Joshua Corey is attempting to recreate in a novel as precisely defined as the images in a mirror and as diffuse as the colors and shadings in a prism. Beautiful Soul, with its ever-shifting parameters, from periphery to center and back again, is a testament to the infinite longing for something or someone who isn’t there, the last word on a world where everything matters. Lewis Warsh

Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy

Literature & Fiction

Corey, Joshua

Contemporary

Spuyten Duyvil Publishing

Poetry. "With SELAH Joshua Corey joins a generation of exciting first-book poets who apply the fundamental poetic gift of the ear, in new ways. Sheer richness of language, and in the best poems cadences layered like those of Wallace Stevens, guide the reader through Corey's extravagant, playful, fantastical, and profuse otherworld" - Robert Pinsky. "He has gone so far into disillusion and aporia that he seems about to emerge out the other side, as through one of those suddenly wavering, watery space- and time-walls in a science-fiction film. What if it is as he says: 'my mouth is full of his breath. / His tongue is in my mouth, and his name / is every body I see'? Selah: lift up! He keeps you hooked; he keeps you tantalized" - Cal Bedient.

Selah

Poetry

Barrow Street Press

The poems of The Barons span 10 years of struggle with the spirit of Romance in the face of world-historical catastrophe: 9/11, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Great Recession. Once again we find ourselves in a waste land stained by spectacle, scabrous and benighted, a landscape populated by opportunists, idiots, amnesiacs, and chumps, unable to comprehend the disaster that has enfolded them. In spite of this the book is haunted by the ancient quest for reconciliation, for some kind of contact with the earth and with other people. From ironic pastoral to black satire to the gates of vision, this book enacts a 21st-century journey toward an elusive horizon of meaning and the paradox of “freedom’s law.”

The Barons

History & Criticism

Omnidawn

Poetry. Winner of the Dorset Prize, selected by Ilya Kaminsky. In his third full-length book of poems, Joshua Corey puts the sonnet to the test with this sequence of fractured, ventilated, and unrhymed poems written in the aftermath of 9/11 while Corey was living at a pastoral remove from war and terror in upstate New York. The tension between idyllic personal circumstances and horrific world-historical events led Corey to produce this series of layered poems, variously sardonic and sincere in tone. "These songs shuttle between a past and a future, cast adrift or severed from a violent, ashen present into a necessary untimeliness.... What then of the sonnet, repository of desire and enemy of time? It is, as ever, that form by which we re-imagine subjectivity to confront altered circumstances, and to assess 'the shipwreck of the singular' in the maelstrom of the many..."—Michael Palmer.

Severance Songs (Dorset Prize)

Tupelo Press

Hannah and the Master

MadHat, Inc.

By turns lyric and hypnotic, How Long is Now examines the delicate membranes separating past and present, authenticity of experience and transgressive truth. A Jewish-American writer, plagued by poetry and history, leaves his dying father and faithless marriage to travel to Germany and later Morocco to attend a William Burroughs conference, an unwritten novel on his plate. Enter a mysterious film, a cocktail of wild characters, and a fractured narrative that attempts a reimagining of his parents’ early courtship while his own life destabilizes into a sad, metaphysical travelogue, and we’re left beguiled by the wondrous, bitter nature of a reality that’s more cut-up than consistent, a Beckett play on deepening failure and paranoia. Hope is not lost, however—it just comes with a price—and as we’re ushered through a lengthening series of psychological obstacles and aesthetic quandaries, we come closer to understanding what that price may be. 
Joe Pan

How Long Is Now

Literary

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