Alfred And Guinevere

(Paperback, Main)

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One of the finest American poets of the second half of the twentieth century, James Schuyler was at the same time a remarkable novelist. Alfred and Guinevere are two children who have been sent by their parents to spend the summer at their grandmother's house in the country. There they puzzle over their parents' absence and their relatives' habits, play games and pranks, make friends and fall out with them, spat and make up. Schuyler has a pitch-perfect ear for the children's voices, and the story, told entirely through snatches of dialogue and passages from Guinevere's diary, is a tour de force of comic and poetic invention. The reader discovers that beneath the book's apparently guileless surface lies a very sophisticated awareness of the complicated ways in which words work to define the often perilous boundaries between fantasy and reality, innocence and knowledge.

Reviews

"The novelis quite an extraordinary piece of work, chronicling an uneasy period in the life of a brother and sister, sevenyearold Alfred and 11yearold Guinevere." Michael Hofmann,London Review of Books

"A delectable little bookA deft and funny creation of a high quality somewhere between the terrorhaunted humor of Richard HughesA High Wind in Jamaicaand the placid, presumably unselfconscious amusements of Daisy AshfordsThe Young Visiters."Commonweal

"Schuyler, who died in 1991, was a noted poet, however this book is not written in 'poetic prose'he employs a simple style, without imagery or complexities. But every page displays a poets sensibility in the fresh and inventive ways Schuyler has his child narrators use and misuse language.Alfred and Guinevereis a small treasure, and its restoration to print is to be commended." Phillip Routh,Rain Taxi Review of Books

"You can hear it now for, in dialogue form, (except when Guinevere Gates is writing in her diary) here are the skirmishes, the misadventures and mishaps, and the troubles that she and her younger brother Alfred get into in their city home"Kirkus Reviews

Author Bio

James Schuyler (1923-1991) was a preeminent figure in the celebrated New York School of poets. He grew up in Washington, D.C., and near Buffalo, New York. After World War II, he made his way to Italy, where he served for a time as W.H. Auden's secretary. His books include two other novels, A Nest of Ninnies(written with John Ashbery) and Alfred and Guinevere (also published by NYRB Classics), as well as numerous volumes of poetry. John Ashbery is the author of twenty books of poetry, including Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975), which received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award; and Some Trees (1956), which was selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Series. He has also published art criticism, plays, and a novel. Ashbery is currently the Charles P. Stevenson, Jr., Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College.