One stormy night in 1826, just north of Galveston Bay, Old Bull, a Cheyenne Indian who had just seen the ocean for the first time, found himself trying to outrace a hurricane. Lifted from his horse, spun around, and thrown down in the bayou, Old Bull rode the current into a small canyon, and survived. He was the only one of his party to return from the expedition, arriving home nearly naked, nearly hallucinating, riding a horse.

Such is the auspicious beginning to the life of Jordan Coolwater, a distant relation to Old Bull, whom we meet as a boy in the 1970s, shooting turtles on a summer day, and being raised by his grandparents on Creek Indian land in the house of his great-great-grandfather, a survivor of the "Trail of Tears." Bearing the burden of his ancestry, Jordan Coolwater—from bored young boy, to thoughtful teenager, struggling artist, escaped convict, and finally, father—is the subject of Eddie Chuculate's prize-winning collection of linked short stories. The first story in the collection, "Galveston Bay, 1826," won an O'Henry Prize in 2007, and the second, "Yo Yo," received a Pushcart Prize Special Mention.

Reminiscent of Denis Johnson's Jesus's Son, Chuculate's gritty, deceptively simple stories also recall Junot Dias and Sherman Alexie. This is not only a portrait of a young Native American artist struggling with the two constants in his life, alcohol and art, but also a portrait of America, of its dispossessed, its outlaws, and its visionaries.

From the Reviews

"Chuculate presents a profound disconnect between the mythology of Indian art and the present-day reality of Indian artists, who rarely get to be artists without the cultural qualifier. He also lays bare the effects of wide-spread multi-generational addiction without making excuses for the way his characters treat each other. There are no saints in here, and no demons, either. Cheyenne Madonna is a fantastic debut."
—Jennifer Levin at The Santa Fe New Mexican

"Chuculate writes forthright prose in a somber key, examining without judgment the lives of Native American characters like Old Bull, a Cheyenne who, in 'Galveston Bay, 1826,' the collection's one stand-alone story, ventures out to see the ocean for the first time, only to get savaged by a hurricane. Memory and will converge here to powerful effect."
— Publishers Weekly

"Every sentence is unexpected, yet infallible…. The calm, beautiful, unexplaining accuracy of description carries us right through the madness of the final adventure."
— Ursula K. Le Guin, author of The Left Hand of Darkness

"This is a book you'll rave about."
— Julie Shigekuni, author of A Bridge Between Us

Eddie Chuculate is Creek and Cherokee Indian from Muskogee, Oklahoma. He has a degree in creative writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts and is the second Native American to have held the Wallace Stegner fellowship at Stanford. He lives in Oklahoma.

"I grew up the son of a famous writer, grew up in his shadow in a general sense, except for two fortuitous graces ... the first, that astrologically speaking I had many planets in Leo and so I was absurdly full of confidence, when I wasn't struck numb with my own incapacities. And the other, and perhaps the decisive factor, was that I had the honor of being a member of the generation that came of age in the sixties." So begins Aram Saroyan's essay, "Occupation: Writer," about his vocation, the sixties generation, and the fundamental task of coming to understand himself not as the son of William Saroyan but as his own person. Saroyan found his calling as a writer early on, starting out as a poet, and going on to write op-ed pieces, reviews, novels, biographies, memoirs, screenplays, and plays. In this essay and others included here, he explores the diYcult task of finding one's way as a writer: the ongoing search for the various doors which must be opened in order to renew one's resources and access the river of creativity.

Both the contemporaneous essays and the earlier reviews from the 1970s, '80s and '90s assess major and minor cultural figures from the generation of which Saroyan himself was so much a representative member, and recall a time when being an independent writer was feasible, when even a young author could hone his craft and critical sensibility through book reviews and op-ed pieces.

In these works, Saroyan contends for books that make for good companionship, what Jack Kerouac decreed was the true test of a book. In Saroyan's engaging and always engaged company, with the likes of Andy Warhol and Charles Mingus, Robert Creeley and Ted Berrigan, Joan Didion and Gore Vidal, Door to the River is good companionship as well.

"A writer who looks deeply into himself and his own experience, confronts what he finds there with real courage and reports what he has experienced with a measure of candor that is both breathtaking and, at moments, heartbreaking." — Jonathan Kirsch, L.A. Times

By the Waters of Manhattan was Charles Reznikoff's first novel, published in 1930 by Charles Boni in New York. Part family saga, part bildungsroman, and part unrequited love story, the novel follows the lives of a Jewish family at the turn of the century from Elizavetgrad, Russia to Brownsville, Brooklyn, birthplace of the novel's protagonist, Ezekiel, a young poet in search of ways to feed his stomach and his soul. Like Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, and Henry Roth, Reznikoff's subject is as much the great island of Manhattan, as it is its inhabitants.

"The title By the Water of Manhattan identifies Reznikoff just as the title Leaves of Grass (which remained the same over the years while the contents of the book grew and changed) identifies Walt Whitman. Both Whitman and Reznikoff are singers and chroniclers of the American island, the name of which derives from the language (Manna-hatta) of its aboriginal inhabitants. Reznikoff's title also includes an allusion to the waters of Babylon beside which the prophet sat down and wept. The American Jew, who had been born in Brooklyn in 1894 and whose parents had emigrated from Czarist Russia some years before that date, evidently felt, like the hero of one of the novels of George Gissing, that he had been 'born in exile'. But the reader should not, on this account, be expecting a tearful immigrant narrative, for if Reznikoff was a student of the Bible he was also a student of another student of the Bible, the philosopher Spinoza. From this stoic master, he had learned neither to laugh nor cry but to try to understand."
— Milton Hindus, "Charles Reznikoff's First Novel: By the Waters of Manhattan"
from Essays: Personal and Impersonal (BSB)

From the Reviews

"Happily, Black Sparrow has reprinted this remarkable novel, which could be read as a one sitting page-turner, or as the text for a semester-long course on the immigrant experience . . . Readers familiar with Reznikoff 's poetry will recognize his alter ego's struggles with the world of publishing; readers curious about the immigrant experience will add this classic to their shelves alongside Yezierska's novels and other great chronicles of the making of America.
— Jewish Book World

"Charles Reznikoff (1894-1976) writes prose like a poet, indeed he is one, with his rock-hard choice of words styled into deceptively simple sentences. Deceptive because when juxtaposed, each sentence accelerating into the next, they relay condensed lives, jammed with emotion, kin, and striving. Lopate's tender and eloquent introduction sets the record straight for this under-acknowledged literary master: '...the shocks of fortune laid out and the aftershocks allowed to register in the reader's mind, with no attempt to milk emotion.'"
— Betsy Sussler, BOMB Magazine, 2009

"I am thrilled with it. This book has so much in it that marks Reznikoff as a first-rate artist."
— William Carlos Williams

"Mr. Reznikoff's work is remarkable and original in American literature. . . . He has written the first story of the Jewish immigrant that is not false."
— Lionel Trilling

BOOK GROUP RESOURCES

• Read about Charles Reznikoff and take a look at his poems.
  

• Visit Charles Reznikoff's unoffical website.
  

• Listen to Charles Reznikoff read some of his poems.

• Read a blog post on the Jewish Book Council Blog. 

• Look at another Godine book, Selected Letters of Charles Reznikoff, 1917-1976. 

Poets who can write prose that equals their poetry are rare. Wanda Coleman, Los Angeles's unofficial poet laureate, proves with this collection of thirteen new short stories an exception to the rule yet again. Jazz and Twelve O'Clock Tales owes its title to the lyrics of "Lush Life" by Billy Strayhorn, Duke Ellington's right-hand man. Like the heartbroken lover in Strayhorn's song, the characters in these stories lead lonely lives full of longing and potential stifled by racism, poverty, and absurd accidents of fate. And yet, even though they are trapped by the present moment, their inner lives are lush, a mirror of the city of angels in which they live, a metropolis, "always simmering," as Coleman writes in the final story, "ever waiting to be borne on that balmy promised crescendo."

Coleman applies a poet's economy of words to her fiction, setting a scene with lightning-quick strokes, letting a detail, a dialogue, or the brisk vernacular speak for itself. Or, alternatively, she will step in and take center stage, an omniscient voice seeing beyond the impending and inevitable tragedy, but powerless to change either narrative or outcome. Powerless, that is, only within the bounds of the story, for Coleman is an author devoted to change, personal and political, writing to affect the balance of power in America. "Nothing will satisfy me," she has written, "short of an open society and social parity."

Listen to the NPR review of Jazz & Twelve O'Clock Tales from "All Things Considered."

Read a review of Jazz & Twelve O'Clock Tales at the San Francisco Gate.

"Every story in Jazz and Twelve O' Clock Tales conveys a fresh verbal improvisation, an unexpected lightness, and the sure understanding of the complexity of the world. Wanda Coleman is a poet and a musician."
— Maryse Condé, author of The Story of the Cannibal Woman and Who Slashed Celanire's Throat?

"Wanda Coleman is a distinctive and original voice in American letters. I love the way that she can combine the poetic and the conversational modes, the delicate way she balances between the comic and the tragic, the sly, insinuating complexity that runs under the surface of seemingly straightforward situations. The stories in Jazz and Twelve O' Clock Tales are inimitable creations—as is Wanda Coleman herself. She is a national treasure."
— Dan Chaon, author of You Remind Me of Me and Among the Missing

BOOK GROUP RESOURCES

• Learn about Wanda Coleman and read some of her poems. 

• Listen to Billy Strayhorn's song "Lush Life," from which Wanda Coleman drew the title for this book. 

• Read the review in The San Francisco Chronicle or a review in The Village Voice.
  

• Read reviews and descriptions of this book and other books by Wanda Coleman.
  

• Take a look at the other Godine books by Wanda Coleman.

Black Sparrow is proud to restore to print one of the great long poems of the late 20th century, Charles Reznikoff's Holocaust, originally published in 1975.

Reznikoff's subject is people's suffering at the hand of another. His source materials are the U.S. government's record of the trials of the Nazi criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunal and the transcripts of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. Except for the twelve part titles, none of the words here are Reznikoff's own: instead he has created, through selection, arrangement, and the rhythms of the testimony set as verse on the page, a poem of witness by the perpetrators and the survivors of the Holocaust. He lets the terrible history unfold – in history's own words.

Reznikoff's technique, says David Lehman, "contradicts the very faculty of understanding. He lets reality speak for itself, lets it state the externals of the thing or event, and leaves unspoken (or edits out) the emotions, which the reader may be counted on to provide for himself."

Few readers will forget the emotions they bring to Holocaust.

Metropolitan Tang is Cambridge poet Linda Bamber's first book of poetry, a debut that is erudite and sassy, urban and urbane. Whether she is examining the breakup of her marriage or watching bulls in a field, considering Derrida's concepts of "presence" or her hairdresser's less theoretical philosophy, Bamber receives stimuli as indiscriminately as an antenna, all eyes and ears; then her sharp and curious mind gets to work, turning over images and ideas until she finds their proper relations, making meaning out of random juxtapositions, sense out of chaos, or, if nothing else, a good joke out of a bad situation. Most first books of poetry are tentative experiments in voice; Bamber's voice, sensitive and, at the same time, wry, is clear throughout, uniquely hers and eminently likeable.

As a reader I have often wished, over the years, for a female poet in the style of [Frank] O'Hara: bopping but sincere, humanistic and grounded but exuberant and irreverent. Linda Bamber may be that person. 
– Tony Hoagland

Alfred Chester's masterpiece, The Exquisite Corpse, was one of the literary sensations of the 1960s, a surreal, homoerotic phantasmagoria that became a cult classic. It was preceded by this, his only other novel, a work more straitlaced in literary form but just as shockingly original in content. It tells the story of a cynical Brooklyn undertaker, Harry, and the object of his affection, a beautiful and deceased young man named Jamie. But does Jamie really exist, or is he merely Harry's fantasy, the illusion that makes his life endurable? Harry's friends are divided on this matter, and Chester leaves it to his readers to decide. We are proud to republish this upside-down take on the transforming powers of love, out of print since the late 1950s.


"Surreal and unflinchingly true to life, at once light, witty and imbued with heavy existential angst. . . Sometimes brutal and hilariously waspish, but always humane. "
-Sam Jordison, Guardian Unlimited (UK)