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Hardcover A Nest of Ninnies Book

ISBN: 0880015233

ISBN13: 9780880015233

A Nest of Ninnies

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Format: Hardcover

Condition: Like New

$24.59
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Book Overview

"James Schuyler and I began writing A Nest of Ninnies purely by chance," writes John Ashbery in his new introduction to this classic of American comic fiction. "We were in a car being driven by the young cameraman, Harrison Starr, with his father as a passenger in the front seat... Jimmy said, 'Why don't we write a novel?' And how do we do that, I asked. 'It's easy--you write the first line, ' was his reply." The result is one of the strangest and most exuberant experiments in American literary history, a verbal tour de force of suburban Americana. First published in 1969, A Nest of Ninnies is a true gem-in-the-rough, the decades-long collaborative project from two of the great poetic minds of the twentieth century. This description may be from another edition of this product.

Customer Reviews

4 customer ratings | 3 reviews

Rated 4 stars
Honey I wrote a novel

This novel doesn't exactly break the sound barrier -- Auden went a little overboard in calling it a minor classic -- but is "likable enough," like Hillary Clinton, and has the unpredictability of the game it started as. Ashbery and Schuyler wrote it one sentence at a time: A. started with "Alice was tired," and it blossomed, to the extent that it did, from there. The first third is fairly choppy as a result; however, as the...

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Rated 5 stars
Auden was right

This book deserves to be recognized as the "minor classic" W. H. Auden thought it was destined to become. The high camp of much of the proceedings only makes the book more profound in its investigation of the contemporary manners of negotiating affect through objects. In this it looks back to Wilde and Henry James, as it does also in its arch staging of the objectification of a mystified "Europe." Entirely fascinating,...

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Rated 4 stars
a good romp

Who would think that two experimental poets could write a comic novel without stylistic pretensions? There's nothing profound here, just a quick read with plenty of laughs. The title conveys the substance fairly well: Schuyler and Ashbery have created a cast of middle- to upper-class fools for whom they have little respect. This could, of course, be fairly tiresome ("aren't the bourgeosie so silly!"), if it weren't for...

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