Zukofsky's "A": An Introduction

SIGNED SCARCE AS NEW FIRST EDITION dust jacket hardcover, clean text, solid binding, NO remainders NOT ex-library slight shelfwear / storage-wear; WE SHIP FAST. In un-clipped very good jacket. Carefully packed and quickly sent. 201601838 SIGNED "Mordecai Richler" on the title page. Reading this collection of essays from 40-plus years ago is a bracing exercise in discovering just how much more artful one had to be as an adversarial pundit in the early 1970s. You couldn't just jab at this or that person, but explain yourself and what you thought. Mordecai Richler never had trouble with that, as "Shovelling Trouble" shows. A collection of essays and book reviews published in magazines from 1960 through 1970 and published in 1972, "Shovelling Trouble" presents Richler having at everything from Norman Mailer to comic-book ads, explaining his approach to writing at a critical juncture in his career, and expressing more than once a sadness about the fact his literary generation doesn't quite measure up against the famous "Lost Generation" (Hemingway, Picasso, et al) of the 1920s. This last point comes to the fore in the collection's best essay, "A Sense Of The Ridiculous", Richler's detailed remembrance of his younger days as a writer in the early 1950s in Paris, the city from whence the Lost Generation sprang and whose collective shadow haunted Richler and his mates. "We were not, it's worth noting, true adventurers, but followers of a romantic convention," he writes. Of the politics and poseurs of that time and place, Richler writes with great amusement and humor, while summoning an atmosphere of quiet, all-encompassing collapse. Walking into a cheap hotel room that once was part of a Wehrmacht brothel, Richler notes, he first would hammer at the door to scare away the rats and ghosts. The ghosts still linger in these pages. We recommend selecting Priority Mail wherever available. (No shipping to Mexico, Brazil or Italy.)