The Guy Davenport Reader

Modernism gave us Yeats and Picasso, Stravinsky and Balanchine—and it gave us Guy Davenport, perhaps its finest and most neglected heir, whose four decades of fiction, poetry, essays, and translations are collected here for the very first time

"The imagination is like the drunk man who has lost his watch, and must get drunk again to find it. It is as intimate as speech and custom, and to trace its ways we need to re–educate our eyes." —Guy Davenport

One of the last pure Modernists, Guy Davenport was perhaps the finest stylist and most protean craftsman of his generation. Publishing more than two dozen books of fiction, essays, poetry and translations over a career of more than forty years, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1990. In poetry and prose, Davenport drew upon the most archaic and the most modern of influences to create what he called "assemblages"—lush experiments that often defy classification.

Woven throughout is a radical and coherent philosophy of desire, design and human happiness. But never before has Davenport's fiction, nonfiction, poetry and translations been collected together in one compendium. Now available in a new paperback edition twenty years after his death, The Guy Davenport Reader offers a true introduction to the far–ranging work of this neglected genius.