Pathetic Literature

Bücher

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Pathetic Literature is poet Eileen Myles’s first book since 2019, a showstopping anthology of 106 contributors both canonical and unpublished that features work they define as “pathetic, ” or appealing to a reader’s inherent sense of emotion.Myles has written an introduction and afterword to contextualize their use of “pathetic” and explain the project’s origins in a seminar they taught in 2005 at UC San Diego, where they first conceived of the phrase and idea. The anthology has only ballooned from there, with contributors expanding boundlessly across time and place and genre.Eileen Myles is one of the most well-known and well-respected contemporary poets working today, with an extensive group of friends and collaborators, many of whom are represented in these pages. We are excited by the possibility of events featuring some of these writers to celebrate this unusual project.A mere fraction of those featured in this anthology include Etel Adnan, Kevin Killian, Fred Moten, John Wieners, Kathy Acker, Maggie Nelson, Layli Long Soldier, Rae Armantrout, Samuel Beckett, Judy Grahn, and Saidiya Hartman. The book is organized with intentional haphazardness, putting unrelated writers next to each other and underscoring the potential for unlikely surprises and dialogues between pieces.We anticipate great excitement from indie bookstores for displays featuring books by these writers and the chance to shine light on small press titles. There is also a wonderful opportunity for course adoption with this book as an invaluable resource of queer writing that is unlikely ever to be replicated.Myles announced the publication of Pathetic Literature at a virtual event organized by the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard, where they described the project and its origins, and shared some of the pieces in the anthology. At the event’s peak, around 170 people were in attendance.Myles has been interviewed and profiled in many outlets, including the New York Times, T Magazine, Rolling Stone, and Artforum. We would hope for similar media attention for this new, utterly unusual book.Evolution, their most recent book of poems, has sold around 5, 000 copies in all formats, and Afterglow (a dog memoir) has sold a little under 10, 000. Both titles continue to backlist.Myles was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts & Letters and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship. In addition to their poetry and writing, they are a photographer, filmmaker, and activist.Grove will be publishing Myles’s next book of poetry in Spring 2023.