About this product

Product Identifiers

PublisherNew York Review of Books, Incorporated, T.H.E.

ISBN-101681374315

ISBN-139781681374314

eBay Product ID (ePID)27038672277

Product Key Features

Book TitleMargery Kempe

Number of Pages192 Pages

LanguageEnglish

Publication Year2020

TopicPsychological, Lgbt / Gay, Literary, Alternative History, Lgbt / General

GenreFiction

AuthorRobert Gluck

FormatTrade Paperback

Dimensions

Item Height0.6 in

Item Weight7.7 Oz

Item Length7.9 in

Item Width5 in

Additional Product Features

Intended AudienceTrade

LCCN2019-039532

Reviews"By the bold device of telling two stories in terms of each other (one of Margery Kempe and Jesus, and the other of a twentieth-century love affair), Robert Glück has produced a book without precedent. This novel brings to mind the huge wings of a painted angel--a texture of brilliant richness covered regularly with small, detailed shadows of implication." --Thom Gunn "At once embracing and thwarting two worlds, two centuries, two sensibilities, what a subtle and powerful amalgam is Margery! Gluck's exquisitely controlled, sensuously textured writing evokes a deeply integrated ecstatic vision that in the end spares us nothing--being nuanced and brutal, passionate and colored with levity, elegant and outrageous." --Lydia Davis "I, for one, find much to admire in contemporary gay authors. One of my favorites is Robert Glück." --Edmund White, " Margery Kempe is a little-known late-twentieth-century classic, counterpoising sexual mores in the wake of the AIDS epidemic with the devastation of the European countryside at the end of the Hundred Years' War. Glück is an acute and unsentimental observer of gestures, botany, skies, and cuisine. He captures the feeling and flow of the late Middle Ages, when 'mobility and chance were beginning,' and brings that world close to his own. Glück brilliantly locates the (New Narrative) impulse toward first-person narration in time and despair. He observes the turning of centuries. As he writes, 'Margery steps into modernity so empty she needs an autobiography.'" --Chris Kraus, Bookforum "By the bold device of telling two stories in terms of each other (one of Margery Kempe and Jesus, and the other of a twentieth-century love affair), Robert Glück has produced a book without precedent. This novel brings to mind the huge wings of a painted angel--a texture of brilliant richness covered regularly with small, detailed shadows of implication." --Thom Gunn "At once embracing and thwarting two worlds, two centuries, two sensibilities, what a subtle and powerful amalgam is Margery! Gluck's exquisitely controlled, sensuously textured writing evokes a deeply integrated ecstatic vision that in the end spares us nothing--being nuanced and brutal, passionate and colored with levity, elegant and outrageous." --Lydia Davis "I, for one, find much to admire in contemporary gay authors. One of my favorites is Robert Glück." --Edmund White, "At once embracing and thwarting two worlds, two centuries, two sensibilities, what a subtle and powerful amalgam is Margery! Gluck's exquisitely controlled, sensuously textured writing evokes a deeply integrated ecstatic vision that in the end spares us nothing--being nuanced and brutal, passionate and colored with levity, elegant and outrageous." --Lydia Davis "I, for one, find much to admire in contemporary gay authors. One of my favorites is Robert Glück." --Edmund White " Margery Kempe is a little-known late-twentieth-century classic, counterpoising sexual mores in the wake of the AIDS epidemic with the devastation of the European countryside at the end of the Hundred Years' War. Glück is an acute and unsentimental observer of gestures, botany, skies, and cuisine. He captures the feeling and flow of the late Middle Ages, when 'mobility and chance were beginning,' and brings that world close to his own. Glück brilliantly locates the (New Narrative) impulse toward first-person narration in time and despair. He observes the turning of centuries. As he writes, 'Margery steps into modernity so empty she needs an autobiography.'" --Chris Kraus, Bookforum "Glück's most beautiful work of fiction . . . The novel stands alone in Glück's oeuvre, not for its wildness--his lucid, precise descriptions of sex distinguish each of his four volumes of fiction--but for its ambiguity. . . . The sense of sex as the summation of many minds and bodies, deeply personal in origin yet ultimately unmoored from the baggage of individual preference, makes moments in this often disturbing book gleam with the feeling of utopia." --Daniel Felsenthal, The Baffler "The writing is lovely. With the subtlety of the obvious, Glück collapses the centuries that separate the two storylines and zips up the space between erotic and religious devotion. Margery's orgasms are God-given, a mingling of godhead and maiden, an ecstasy of body and spirit. Aren't most of us as mystified by our sexuality as we are by divinity? Why not consider the former with the awe we reserve for the latter?" --Julia Berick, The Paris Review "By the bold device of telling two stories in terms of each other (one of Margery Kempe and Jesus, and the other of a twentieth-century love affair), Robert Glück has produced a book without precedent. This novel brings to mind the huge wings of a painted angel--a texture of brilliant richness covered regularly with small, detailed shadows of implication." --Thom Gunn

Dewey Edition20

Dewey Decimal813/.54

SynopsisLust, 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.", 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 Gl ck'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 Gl ck's masterpiece bears comparison with the finest work of such writers as Kathy Acker and Chris Kraus.This edition includes an essay by Gl ck about the creation of the booktitled"My Margery, Margery's Bob.", 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 maiden and Jesus Christ. First published in 1994, Robert Gl ck'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 Gl ck's masterpiece bears comparison with the finest work of such writers as Kathy Acker and Chris Kraus.

LC Classification NumberPS3557.L82M37 2020