Here & Elsewhere

"Before he turned to criticism and became the American Coleridge, Kenneth Burke was a writer of fiction. His avant-garde short stories were unlike any others of the 1920s; indeed, stories even remotely like them would not come along for decades. Not for Burke the stripped-down language of Hemingway or the topical social satire of Fitzgerald; instead he was intent on constructing rhetorically gorgeous "peopled essays" that anticipated, by nearly half a century, the work of Calvino, Gass, and Nicholson Baker." "Here & Elsewhere collects, for the first time in one volume, all of Burke's fiction, most of it out of print since the 1960s. The centerpiece is Towards a Better Life (1932), a series of grave, malicious epistles by John Neal, a worldly ascetic and philosophical dandy, addressed to his former friend Anthony, a rival for the affections of the alluring young Florence. Here too are twenty short stories, from the previously uncollected "Parabolic Tale" (1917) to Burke's late masterpiece "The Anaesthetic Revelation of Herone Liddell" (1957), as well as three prose exercises - mad riffs on old age, old "isms," and old institutions."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved