Bøker utgitt av Spuyten Duyvil

The dates are important to mention in order to put the open sensuality in the novel in perspective., that is, pre-AIDS, when male-male sexuality was being liberated from its centuries-long subterranean hiddenness into a visibility if only, in this instance, of the twilit and claustrophobic “freedom” of a bath house.     (M.R. from the intro)

Poetry. "SAPPHOPUNK is a vivid, visceral experiment in 'somatic abundance, ' a hybrid text blurring prose, poetry, history, and theater. Set in a sensual, imaginary academy, hastain's text describes a teacher, S, who 'conjures cooperative thrive' among her female students. Their idyllic rituals are disrupted when S encounters Phaon, an 'outcast' whose gender play disturbs the initiations S orchestrates. 'Can S conceive of a reason to transcend the anatomy of her academy?' asks hastain. What's at stake here is how to value lesbian literary history built on gender binaries while simultaneously writing queer literature that interrogates those binaries." Carol Guess"

Fiction. "Open MULTIFESTO anywhere, careful reader, and your feet will come unmoored from the ground, your liver will be eaten by hungry jackals, substituting for an eagle, and your eyes, feeding your brain phrases such as 'I am reading a book, ' will grow thick with beautiful cataracts. The text spins like a square planet into untold dimensions of heat and light where heat, no longer warm, and light, no longer bright, are free to assume new costumes in a Mardi Gras drag show." Raymond Federman"Very seldom does a book come along that's as difficult to characterize as Davis Schneiderman's MULTIFESTO: A HENRI D'MESCAN READER, a baroque architecture of writing, a wedding-cake of literary history, criticism, politics, and art. It's as though Duchamp, Deleuze and Guattari, and Burroughs have collaborated to create a work that is part artist book, part biography, part album, all send-up-a work that is determined to throw the definition of literature into flux once again." Steve Tomasula"

Fiction. "Beautifully raw and honest, Adam Berlin's novel follows two characters through the long darkness in New York after 9/11. This is about the running, the drinking, the standing still, and the unquantifiable missing. Berlin's book is shattering, real, first-person history, made intimate by a narrator forced to stare at himself against the hole of Ground Zero." James Frey"

Poetry. "Quirky, electric poems, spare and challenging." Peter Matthiessen"Martine Bellen is a poet of refreshing complexity. Her unpredictable disjunctions and conjunctions and her baroque mix of vivid images and meticulous abstractions make one uncertain whether these poems (in verse composed of prose segments) are precise narrations of the contingent or of dreams or of the former masquerading as the latter. They are full of surprises." Jackson Mac Low"Martine Bellen's poems dissolve the world of ordinary conversation and etch out patterns that demand another kind of world, one in which Satan is satin but still Satan. And then it comes as something of a shock to find it's in fact our ordinary world still, which she has somehow gotten from a new angle. A real achievement." Keith Waldrop"

The implicit heart of Gavronsky’s imaginary meditation lies in the daunting similarity of the dialogues on the two fronts of the war between terror and authority.                        Harold Bloom, “On Gavronsky”

How many ways does the past haunt the present? Can it give you the courage to finally follow your heart? Part literary mystery, part how-to-reinvent-your-life, and 100% delicious, Sunday Taylor's entrancing novel about Charlotte Brontë will have you captivated from page one. Get ready to put the outside world on hold. You don’t just read this book, you live it.        ~ Lisa Borgnes Giramonti

The Chicago Window is structured similar to the eponymous architectural phenomenon: two double-hung sash novellas flanking a fixed center novel. The three panes include: Moby Grape, In the Penal Colony, and Judith Beheading Holofernes. Each of these three works deals obliquely with the gentrification of Chicago’s Near Northwest Side.

Homero Pumarol’s poetry reveals another country. It opens doors that were previously marked out with trepidation.  Facing the disappointments from the 80’s and the machinations of the 70’s, the 90’s have brought us a voice which can lift bridges into the most unsuspected corners.    Miguel D. Mena

Valery Oisteanu took the Lower East Side to Morocco in this color-suffused book and brought it back still redolent and alive, something we need badly as the glass walls of the evil corporate prison squeeze the life out of us. Take this book with you just in case you run into Satan." Andrei Codrescu, author of No Time Like Now: New Poems

Every day, the old man enters the fallout shelter and works on the two manuscripts. He retypes the story of the cowboy hero beside the story of how the Negro boy really died. “Wisteria is a clinging vine,” he writes today. “It grows the way the old narratives do. But when I think of wisteria, it all comes back to me in fractals.” The working novelist learns to respect cause and effect in his own way.

In Shades & Graces, Salcman tells us early on that “Every intern knows it doesn’t matter how long an incision is, just how wide,” and in this accurate and marvelous detail provides a metaphor for the way a surgeon’s suturing provides a signature, “closed but open like a grave,” that “even God can’t erase.” In poem after poem, Salcman’s signature—the stitched lines of his verse—are characterized by verve, clarity, and formal finesse, and as such they attempt to heal the various and vexing wounds of experience.   —Michael Collier, former poet laureate of Maryland, director of the Bread Loaf Writers╩╝ Conference, Professor of English at the University of Maryland and author of “My Bishop and Other Poems.”

In this highly individuated and dignified book, every kind of separation is spoken as synaesthesia.  Verbal, sensual, spiritual “derangements” divide up the page between them and make mildly glorious a mourning.    Sharon Thesen