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.

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

D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930) made a contribution to poetry that, in the words of Lousie Bogan, "can now be recognized as one of the most important, in any language, of our time." Birds, Beasts, and Flowers!, his first great experiment in free verse, was published when he was thirty-eight. This Black Sparrow edition re-sets the text in the format of the first edition (New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1923) and restores several "indecent" lines suppressed by the original publisher. Lawrence's original jacket artwork is reproduced on the jacket in full color.

Many of these individual poems are popuar in anthologies - they are best read, however, in the context and continuum of the whole book. In preparing the original collection for publication, Lawrence grouped the poems in a purposeful sequence and prefaced many of the subsections with brief quotations from the third edition of John Burnet's Early Greek Philosophy, which particularly interested him at the time.

He believed in writing poetry that was stark, immediate and true to the mysterious inner force which motivated it. Many of his best-loved peoms treat the physical and inner life of plants and animals; others are bitterly satiric and express his outrage at the puritanism and hypocrisy of conventional Anglo-Saxon society. -- Academy of American Poets

Birds, Beasts and Flowers is the peak of Lawrence's achievement as a poet...Like the romantics [his] starting point in these poems is a personal encounter between himself and some animal or flower, but, unlike the romantics, he never confuses the feelings they arouse in him with what he sees and hears and knows about them. The lucidity of his language matches the intensity of his vision; he can make the reader see what he is saying as very few writers can. -- W.H. Auden

These three novels of the 1930s constitute an American classic. In their own way, they do for the Jewish immigrants of Brooklyn what Studs Lonigan did for the Irish of Chicago. So it is no surprise that, upon their first publication, Lonigan's creator welcomed them in a review for The Nation, praising Fuchs's keen eye, excellent ear for dialogue, and quick perception of the grotesque, the whimsical, the tragic. "I know of few novelists in America today," James T. Farrell said, "who possess Fuchs's natural talent and energy or his sense of life."

In his 80s Fuchs wrote: "I used to go on long walks . . . take in the street sights at night. I freely used the sights and happenings in the three novels I wrote in my 20s: Summer in Williamsburg (1934), Homage to Blenholt (1936), and Low Company (1937). . .I had 'ideas' for each of these books, but I soon tired of them, ideas being -- for me, at any rate -- unsatisfactory. I abandoned them. . .and devoted myself simply to the tenement: the life in the hallways, the commotion at the dumbwaiters, the assortment of characters in the building, their strivings and preoccupations, their troubles in the interplay of the sexes. There was always a ferment, slums or no slums. The slums didn't hold them down."

Time hasn't held down these novels, either. Like Joseph Mitchell's New York sketches of the same period, they are as alive today as the day they were first printed, as tropical-rainforest lush, as exuberant. What's true remains so, and Farrell spoke the truth back in 1937: there are still few novelists in America today who possess Fuchs's talent, his energy, his sense of life.


"Fuchs is a master. He had Pasternak's wonder at youth's encounter with the wider world, and Chekhov's nose for thwarted desire, and Turgenev's generosity to the barbarians of the new order."
— Boris Fishman, The New Republic

"These novels capture, better than any of the better-known works of the time, the eerie tenor of the Great Depression, the sense of living without a past or any hope for the future. Fuchs' ability to replicate the quixotic energy of life on the streets of New York in this age of futility is unmatched by any of his contemporaries."
— Gabriel Miller, The Star Ledger

"The tenement tumult and its setting for what Fuchs called 'the daily mystery' are available for the first time in years. I am giving this to our son, who is part of Willliamsburg's vibrant young set, so he can read about a long-ago Brooklyn, then, as now, a crucible that shaped the American character."
— Steven Isenberg in Austin American-Statesman

"There is a touching, reflexive glance backward in much of what Fuchs writes — a sense of the irretrievable in life."
— Art Winslow, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"The greatest strength of Fuchs's writing is the way it captures the distinctive tones of Jewish speech."
— Adam Kirsch, New York Sun

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)