David Slavitt's Absurdist Novel, 'Walloomsac,' Has Been Released with Anaphora

Walloomsac: A Roman Fleuve: ($20, ISBN: 978-1-937536-90-9, LCCN: 2014952145, 176pp, 6X9", October 2014; purchase on: CreateSpace, and Amazon; Kindle Edition: $2.99): If a novel is a work of prose of some length, this is a novel-but different in that it is more like life, which has no plots and does not reward virtue or punish vice, and in which characters appear and then, if the author doesn't kill them off, remain to the end. Life is messier than Tolstoy and Henry James were willing to admit. Here, in David R. Slavitt's farrago, one thing leads to another but without discernible direction until, at the end, there is a kind of resolution, a vision, however unreliable and approximate, of what the life of the speaker has been. It is a deeply thoughtful book but also laugh-out-loud funny. Like life, if we're lucky.

David R. Slavitt: educated at Andover, Yale, and Columbia, is the author of more than 115 books-novels, poetry, reportage, and translations. He was the movie reviewer for Newsweek in the sixties and was co-editor of the "Johns Hopkins Complete Roman Drama" as well as the "Penn Complete Greek Drama." Among his recent publications: "The Sonnets and Short Poems of Francesco Petrarch "(2012, Harvard University Press), Civil Wars (2013, Louisiana State University Press), "The Four Other Plays of Sophocles" (2013 Johns Hopkins University Press), and "The Crooning Wind: Three Greenlandic Poets" (New American Press 2013), and "Shiksa" (C&L Press). His version of "The Mahabharata" will be published in the spring by Northwestern University Press.

"David Slavitt has (herein) written a book about or for which it is impossible simply to write a blurb-a word, it might interest you to know, coined in 1907 by Gelett Burgess. (Did you think of a purple cow, just then?) The text itself is indescribably (deliciously?) itself. Like the Waloomsac River, it just keeps rolling along, taking the reader irresponsibly with it-laughing out loud again and again and again; marveling at its rapid wit (white water?), the wide breadths of its erudition, the dangerous shallows of its overt and covert cheekiness; marking the vertiginous depths of its, yes, wisdom. To make a long blurb short, I haven't had this kind of significant fun since I stayed up 'til dawn one night in 1962 breathlessly reading Pale Fire for the very first time." ?R. H. W. Dillard on Walloomsac: A Week on the River

$20, Paperback: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1937536904
$2.99, Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00O4FRIXE

The Anaphora Literary Press was started as an academic press with the publication of the Pennsylvania Literary Journal (PLJ) in 2009. In the Winter of 2010, Anaphora began accepting book-length submissions. Anaphora has now published over 90 creative and non-fiction books. John Paul Jaramillo's collection of short stories received an honorable mention for the Latino Literacy Now's Mariposa Award Best First Fiction Book Award. Professors have taught from a few Anaphora books. Many Anaphora writers have scheduled readings at major bookstores. Anaphora books have also had several articles published about them in regional newspapers. PLJ has featured interviews with best-selling writers like Larry Niven, and Cinda Williams Chima, as well as interviews with the winners of the Sundance and Brooklyn Film festivals.

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