Between World Wars I and II, three expatriate Americans attempt to reconstruct a vision of the fractured Europe they’ve been forced to occupy; meanwhile, in the near future, a nameless narrator wanders the desolation of the United States, looking for (and dreading to find) any sign of life. But where the normal historical novel treats the past like the present, The Scenarists of Europe deals in the actual form of the past – corrupted files and incomplete documents, static tableaux and broken images, between which we must imagine the connections – and, in the process, constructs a dreamlike critique of the transmission of history, the empire-building ambitions of modernism, and the ahistorical wilderness of the world’s last superpower.

Scenarists of Europe (American Literature)

Literature & Fiction

Judge, Michael S.

United States

Dalkey Archive Press

In America, history and myth are forced to populate the same terrain. America is not an answer to impossible questions, but a result of their friction. We live on territory permanently unresolved between historical malpractice and millennial ambition. We're a myth constantly collapsing into actual atrocities--a dream with the power to kill. As we export our dreams for the world to consume, the world finds American sleep a fissile hazmat, its half-life longer than any Geiger counter could reckon. "And even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget / falls drop by drop upon the heart / until, in our own despair, against our will, / comes wisdom through the awful grace of God." Thus Robert Kennedy, misquoting Aeschylus upon the death of Martin Luther King, 2 months before his own assassination. This astonishing and very different novel, vast, visionary, and grieving, is ambitious beyond any we have ever published. It aspires to tapestry the inner life of our American experiment in its three threads of despair, wisdom, and grace. Despair: each individual trauma as a local case of our national pathology. Wisdom: the ineradicable record of our wrongs. Grace, the awful grace of god: a mythic disclosure that cannot lie, though it can destroy. These three strands, and their mangled topology, are Michael S. Judge's "Lyrics of the Crossing."

Lyrics of the Crossing

Literary

Fugue State Press

...And Egypt Is the River is a collection of mystical prose-poems which the author describes as an attempt, based on the linguistic theories of R.W. Emerson, Ernest Fenollosa, and Hugh Kenner, among others, to trace the evolution of cosmology and myth as derived from a people's immediate sensory experience. In one sense it is an exploration of the genesis of language, the primal utterances that transcend from the physical world of sound denoting object to how images come to bring about self-awareness and fuse shared mythologies; or as the poet would say - "impact that compels words, that collect in fossil tidepools of the skull." Explore the world of Hibou, the experiential, Klang, the experienced, and the 3rd, who oscillates somewhere in between. "Riffs of heightened prose pleasure the senses, with auditory, tactile, and hallucinatory provocations. To endure such a rigorous and sustained assault on the essential poetic metaphors is a fierce initiation. This Egypt of the Mental Traveller is a dream of the true path, subtle and dangerous and undeceived." - Iain Sinclair

...and Egypt Is the River

Poetry

Skylight Press

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