Stealing History

(Paperback, First Trade Paper Edition)

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In the tradition of essayists like Montaigne and Emerson, Gerald Stern reflects with wit, pathos, rage, and tenderness on 85 years of life. In 70 short, intermingling essays Stern moves nimbly between the past and the present, the personal and the philosophical. Creating the immediacy of dailiness, he writes with entertaining engagement about what hes reading, be it Spinoza, Maimonides, John Cage, Etheridge Knight, James Schuyler, or Lucille Clifton, and then he seamlessly turns to memories of his student years in Europe on the GI Bill, or his political and social action. Interwoven with his formidable recollections are passionate discussions of lifelong obsessions: his conflicted identity as a secular Jew opposed to Israels Palestine policy; the idea of neighbors in various forms, from the women of Gees Bend, who together made beautiful quilts, to the inhabitants of Jedwabne, who on a single day in 1941 slaughtered 300 Jews; and issues of justice.

Reviews

"Gerald Stern is one of those writers whose style insinuates itself into your consciousness like a catchy tune, so that you find your thoughts echoing its rhythms, bopping from one to another, back and forth, like thought and language doing a jitterbug." -- Philadelphia Inquirer
BR>"There is no warning as to where Jerry, as his many friends call him, will strike next as he roams about his long and productive life." -- Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"It is patient and wise, but also frenzied, angry--kind of wild. It's loose and free, but also elegantly written. The work is a trip, full of humor, wit and wisdom. The kind of thing you read in slow, measured sips. It's your grandfather on Sunday afternoons, after his scotch, plunked down on the beat-up old armchair that became his honorary pedestal." -- San Antonio Express-News

"By turns Talmudic and profane, unsentimental and heartbreaking: the poet transforms himself in these essays into a Tristram Shandy for our times, a Montaigne who finds in the intricate unspooling of experiences, outrages, and joys a perspective that is generous, wise, and cut through with wit."-- Walter Mosley

Author Bio

Gerald Stern's recent books of poetry are Early Collected Poems: 1965--1992, Save the Last Dance, This Time: New and Selected Poems, which won the National Book Award, Odd Mercy, and Bread without Sugar. His collection of essays What I Can't Bear Losing was published by Trinity University Press in trade paper in 2009. His honors include the Award of Merit Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Paris Review's Bernard F. Conners Award, the Bess Hokin Award from Poetry, the Ruth Lilly Prize, four National Endowment for the Arts grants, the Pennsylvania Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts, the Jerome J. Shestack Poetry Prize from the American Poetry Review, and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. In 2005 Stern was selected to receive the Wallace Stevens Award for mastery in the art of poetry. For many years a teacher at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, Stern now lives in Lambertville, New Jersey.