The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard (Library of America); The Nancy Book (Siglio)

Eight great local literary fixtures will read from artist Joe Brainard's writings, celebrating the release of the new anthology The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard, and featuring the collection of his visual art, The Nancy Book.  The participating readers are Bernard Cooper, Amy Gerstler,  Lewis MacAdams, Lisa Pearson, Aram Saroyan, Ara Shirinyan, Michael Silverblatt, and Benjamin Weissman.

JOE BRAINARD (1942-1994) left Tulsa at eighteen for New York City and soon became a part of the thriving downtown art scene and the New York School of poets and painters. Over his career, Brainard created a prodigious body of literary and visual work, distinguished by its breadth, originality, and rare alchemy of sensuality and precision, sophistication and sweetness. Among his beloved writings, Brainard wrote the legendary memoir I Remember, which was hailed as “a masterpiece” by Paul Auster and inspired George Perec’s Je me souviens. Brainard’s drawings, assemblages, collages, and paintings are in private and museum collections, including those of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of America Art, and a major travelling retrospective was organized by the Berkeley Art Museum in 2001 and included a stop at MOMA P.S 1.

Bernard Cooper is the author, most recently, of The Bill From My Father (Simon & Schuster). He’s the recipient of The PEN Hemingway Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. For six years he was the art critic for Los Angeles Magazine.

Amy Gerstler is a writer living in Los Angeles. Her most recent book of poems is Dearest Creature (Penguin).

Lewis MacAdams is a poet, journalist, frequent contributor to the LA Weekly, Los Angeles Times, and Los Angeles Magazine, as well as co-founder of the Friends of the Los Angeles River. His dozen books include The Birth of Cool (The Free Press) and most recently, Dear Oxygen (University of New Orleans Press).

Lisa Pearson is the founder and publisher of Siglio. She co-edited, with Ron Padgett, The Nancy Book by Joe Brainard, and most recently edited It Is Almost That: A Collection of Image+Text Work by Women Artists and Writers.

Aram Saroyan’s Complete Minimal Poems (Ugly Duckling Presse) received the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. His most recent book is Door to the River: Essays and Reviews from the 1960s into the Digital Age (Black Sparrow Press). And he has seven titles, old and new, on kindle and nook.

Ara Shirinyan is the editor of Make Now Press, one of the organizers of the Poetic Research Bureau, and a poet who most recently published Your Country Is Great: Afghanistan-Guyana (Futurepoem).

Michael Silverblatt is the “reader writers dream about” (Joyce Carol Oates) and the host of the country’s premier literary talk show Bookworm which has been running since 1989 from KCRW studios in Santa Monica.

Benjamin Weissman is the author of two books of short fiction, most recently Headless (Akashic).

The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard (Hardcover)

By Ron Padgett, Paul Auster

$35.00

ISBN-13: 9781598531497
Availability: In the Warehouse (Usually ships to store or customer in 2-7 days. Call for time-sensitive orders)
Published: Library of America, 3/2012

An artist associated with the New York School of poets, Joe Brainard (1942-1994) was a wonderful writer whose one-of-a-kind autobiographical work "I Remember" ("a completely original book" -Edmund White) has had a wide and growing influence. It is joined in this major new retrospective with many other pieces that for the first time present the full range of Brainard's writing in all its deadpan wit, madcap inventiveness, self-revealing frankness, and generosity of spirit. "The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard" gathers intimate journals, jottings, stories, one-liners, comic strips, mini-essays, and short plays, many of them available until now only as expensive rarities, if at all. "Brainard disarms us with the seemingly tossed- off, spontaneous nature of his writing and his stubborn refusal to accede to the pieties of self-importance," writes Paul Auster in the introduction to this collection. "These little works . . . are not really about anything so much as what it means to be young, that hopeful, anarchic time when all horizons are open to us and the future appears to be without limits." Assembled by the author's longtime friend and biographer Ron Padgett and including fourteen previously unpublished works, here is a fresh and affordable way to rediscover a unique American artist.

---

The Nancy Book (Hardcover)

By Joe Brainard, Bill Berkson, Ted Berrigan

$39.50

ISBN-13: 9780979956201
Availability: In the Warehouse (Usually ships to store or customer in 2-7 days. Call for time-sensitive orders)
Published: Siglio, 4/2008

From 1963 through 1978, Joe Brainard created more than one hundred works of art that appropriated the classic comic strip character Nancy and sent her into an astonishing variety of spaces, all electrified by the incongruity of her presence. THE NANCY BOOK is the first collection of Brainard's Nancy texts, drawings, collages and paintings, with full page reproductions of over fifty works, several of which have never been exhibited or published before. In THE NANCY BOOK, Joe Brainard's Nancy traverses high art and low, the poetic and pornographic, the surreal and the absurd. Whether inserted into hypothetical situations, dispatched on erotic adventures, or seemingly rendered by the hands of artists as varied as Leonardo da Vinci, R. Crumb, Larry Rivers, and Willem de Kooning, Brainard's Nancy revels in as well as transcends her two-dimensionality.

---