Robert Gluck Bücher

Lust, religious zeal, and heartache come together in this provocative novel about two infatuations, one between a man and his young lover in the late 20th century and another between a 15th-century woman and Jesus Christ. First published in 1994, Robert Glück’s Margery Kempe is one of the most provocative, poignant, and inventive American novels of the last quarter century. The book tells two stories of romantic obsession. One, based on the first autobiography in English, the medieval Book of Margery Kempe, is about a fifteenth-century woman from East Anglia, a visionary, a troublemaker, a pilgrim to the Holy Land, and an aspiring saint, and her love affair with Jesus. It is complicated. The other is about the author’s own love for an alluring and elusive young American, L. It is complicated. Between these two Margery Kempe, the novel, emerges as an unprecedented exploration of desire, devotion, abjection, and sexual obsession in the form of a novel like no other novel. Robert Glück’s masterpiece bears comparison with the finest work of such writers as Kathy Acker and Chris Kraus. This edition includes an essay by Glück about the creation of the book titled "My Margery, Margery's Bob."

""I was a writer, but not the writer I needed to be. For that I had to become a different person," Robert Glück, widely acclaimed as a novelist and as a theorist of "the new narrative," recently told the Paris Review, in which a section of About Ed has appeared. About Ed is Glück's portrait of the artist Ed Aulerich-Sugai, his sometime lover, met in the seventies in San Francisco, when gay life emerged unabashedly from the closet. "I wanted to find in Ed something to latch on to that was outside my egotism and fear, my threadbare relation to the world-a leap through Ed into lyric time," Glück has said, and in this book that is both "a novel and my version of an AIDS memoir" he wanted to capture the full range of his feelings for Ed: "estranged from Ed, bored by him, moved by him." It is a book about the life they lived together-art and writing and family and sex and death-and, composed over many decades, it is also a book about how the past continues to change in memory and to charge the present. "What is the right question to ask about a life?" Glück asks, describing About Ed as a "collaborative project," since "Ed helped me write this book." Ed gave him "notes to fashion a chapter about the day he was diagnosed so I could describe his experience from the inside," and "after Ed died, Daniel, Ed's partner, lent me Ed's dream journals.... He started writing them in 1970, the year that we met. We both used his journals, not as puzzles to solve the truth of a self but as a commons producing images that we harvested for paintings and poems. And fifty years later, there I was reading and copying out and running away from his dreams. Are they a condensed version of Ed? Shorthand? Distillation? Is he knowable and unknowable in the same degree sleeping or waking?" About Ed is a challenging and beautiful book by one of America's finest and most adventurous writers"-- Provided by publisher