Bruce Olds is the author of the novels Bucking the Tiger (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25), about the western frontier dentist-gambler Doc Holliday, and Raising Holy Hell (Henry Holt, $22), about the abolitionist John Brown.
Paul Metcalf: Collected Works, Volumes 1–3 by Paul Metcalf (Coffehouse Press, $35 each volume). The complete ouevre (1956–1997) of America’s most neglected writer of major importance. Paul, Herman Melville’s great-grandson, once described himself to me as a “documentary poet.” His idiosyncratic, architecturally original work, much of which explores the history, geography, and geology of the Americas, is for everyone interested in a new way of seeing.
Omensetter’s Luck by William Gass (Penguin USA, $13). Ostensibly the story of the inhabitants of a late–19th century Midwestern village, it is in fact a text about the music, architecture, and beauty of language, as are all of this philosopher-author’s works. An extraordinary and extraordinarily American first novel of enduring, radiantly soaring, and transcendent genius.
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Wisconsin Death Trip by Michael Lesy (University of New Mexico Press, $30). A brilliant example of how original text, archival photographs, and old newspaper stories can combine to produce a synergy that results in something like a poetry of history, in this case the dark, desolate frontier that was northern Wisconsin in the 1890s.
Tender Buttons: Objects, Food, Rooms by Gertrude Stein (Dover Publications, $5). The literary equivalent of Cubist painting—or as close as we are likely ever to come. The great woman’s most economical attempt to disconnect words from their referent meanings. She succeeded. Brilliantly.
Beautiful Losers by Leonard Cohen (Vintage Books, $13). One part Joyce, one part Henry Miller, one part Kerouac. Beat fiction raised to the poeticized level of psychosexual, pan-religious myth. “Magic is Alive/God is Afoot.” Up with the polymorphous perverse.
Dice Thrown Never Will Annul Chance by Stéphane Mallarmé (out of print). The penultimate (pre-?)modernist poem. A magnificent failure, sublimely realized. For aesthetic beauty, sonic and spatial both, for delicacy of exquisite, painfully precise imagery, nothing short of an unsurpassed harmonic miracle.