From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate (Vol. 1-5) Box Set
Format:Set / collection
Publisher:The 87 Press
Publishing:25th Oct '26
£69.99
This title is due to be published on 25th October, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
Complete box set of epic jazz novels from legendary writer and theorist Nathaniel Mackey
From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate collects five novels exploring music, philosophy, and the everyday in a patchwork of jazz-infused prose.
From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate explores music, philosophy, myth, erotics, and sociality in a rich and innovative patchwork of dreams, discourse, and everyday life.
Mackey’s epic quintet is an epistolary novel that unfolds through N.’s intimate letters to the mysterious Angel of Dust. Unexpected events and profound happenings occur as N. delves into the goings-on of his transmorphic Los Angeles-based jazz ensemble, in which he is a composer and multi-instrumentalist.
The story opens in July 1978 with a dream of a haunting Archie Shepp solo and a disassembled bass clarinet, and closes in June 1984 with a disconcertingly positive review of the ensemble’s first album Orphic Bend.
Unlike anything written today, From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate collects the full five installments—Bedouin Hornbook, Djbot Baghostus’s Run, Atet A.D., Bass Cathedral, and Late Arcade—of Nathaniel Mackey’s genre-defying work of serial fiction, which layers realism and myth through jazz-infused prose.
Our greatest living epic poet... Mackey’s poetry and criticism... have reinvented modernism for our time. —LitHub
Mackey has now written close to one thousand pages of fiction about music that does not exist... What is so revolutionary about it, still, is the way Mackey makes the pain of this absence into the occasion for renewing a love of language, of redirecting our ears toward the page... [His] handling of history is subtle and immaculate. —BOMB Magazine
Nathaniel Mackey is a poet of ongoingness involved in a kind of spiritualist or cosmic pursuit. —Edward Hirsch, The Washington Post
It feels, sentence to sentence and page to page, like a work in the act of being created. It is not simply writing about jazz... There is a cliché about music writing, sometimes attributed to Thelonious Monk, among others: ‘Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.’ If so, Nathaniel Mackey is compelled, rather than deterred, by the multiform madness of the enterprise. He is the Balanchine of the architecture dance. —David Hajdu, The New York Times
Mackey isn’t simply playing the part of a poet recounting jazz, he’s fully engaged in the creation of its written iteration, his script a study of rhythm, flow, freedom and, yes, discipline, his words as expressive and imaginative as Coltrane’s or Coleman’s most deviously-conceived notes. —Spencer Grady, Jazzwise
Instead of accepting the casual clichés which plague musical writing, Mackey adapts a set of stylistics which are uniquely his own: much like those breaths which are prodigiously pushed out of a tenor, a trumpet, or an oboe, the words read as chaotic, harmonious, suspensions of the spirit which one must hear before they may fully inhabit. —Bennet S. Johnson, Literati Bookstore, Ann Arbor, MI
Singular, ongoing, great American jazz novel. —John Madera, Big Other
A literary adventure of the highest order, a feat of prose and imagination that takes the fiction genre into new territory. One of the most memorable meetings of prose and jazz in English literature. —Florence Wetzel, All About Jazz
A poetic lift... wild, free-wheeling spirit... —Kirkus
- Winner of Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, Poetry Foundation 2014
- Winner of National Book Award - Poetry 2006
- Winner of Whiting Writers' Award 1993
ISBN: 9781068204784
Dimensions: 198mm x 129mm x 70mm
Weight: unknown