Another Kind of Madness: A Novel by Ed Pavli (English) Paperback Book

Description: Another Kind of Madness by Ed Pavli "A full-bodied literary achievement bustling with sweat, regret, and sound." -KIESE LAYMON FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description Ndiya Grayson returns to her childhood home of Chicago as a young professional, but even her high-end job in a law office cant protect her from half-repressed memories of childhood trauma. One evening, vulnerable and emotionally disarrayed, she goes out and meets her equal and opposite: Shame Luther, a no-nonsense construction worker by day and a self-taught piano player by night. The love story that ensues propels them on an unforgettable journey from Chicagos South Side to the coast of Kenya as they navigate the turbulence of long-buried pasts and an uncertain future. A stirring novel tuned to the clash between soul musics vision of our essential responsibility to each other and a world that breaks us down and tears us apart, Another Kind of Madness is an indelible tale of human connection.A full-bodied literary achievement bustling with sweat, regret, and sound. - Kiese Laymon [A] beautiful debut novel...Pavlics prose is simple yet lyrical, which strikingly depicts not only the intricacies of Ndiya and Shames relationship, but also a city and its history, as seen through architectural turnover and musical evolution. This is a moving novel about two people finding the strength to move forward together. - Publishers WeeklyPavlic delivers a soulful debut novel about love and restoring hope...In prose by turns lyrical and mesmerizing, Pavlic taps deeply into what it means to be Black in America, tossing in some surprising narrative tricks along the way. - Booklist Author Biography Ed Pavli is the author of eight collections of poems, including Visiting Hours at the Coloring Line and Lets Let That Are Not Yet: Inferno, both of which were winners of the National Poetry Series. He has published essays, poems, fiction, and dramatic pieces with dozens of outlets, including the New York Times, Boston Review, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, and Callaloo. His critical work includes Who Can Afford to Improvise?: James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners and Crossroads Modernism: Descent and Emergence in African American Literary Culture. A recipient of the Author of the Year Award from the Georgia Writers Association and a fellowship from the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University, Pavli is Distinguished Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of Georgia. Table of Contents ContentsBook One: Neutral CornersBook Two: Stolen HandsBook Three: InflationBook Four: ArchipelagoBook Five: Angel, Unarmed Review Praise for Another Kind of Madness"The pleasure of music and ache of language drive [Pavlis] first novel. . . . Characters feed off one another like improvisatory musicians, and, like Finnegans Wake, the book begins at the end and ends just before the beginning."—Minneapolis Star Tribune"An ode to Chicago, Kenya, and soul music as humanitys worldwide hum . . . In Ed Pavlis remarkable and groundbreaking novel, Another Kind of Madness, literary tropes and images are pried loose." —Colorado Review"[A] beautiful debut novel . . . Pavlis prose is simple yet lyrical, which strikingly depicts not only the intricacies of Ndiya and Shames relationship, but also a city and its history, as seen through architectural turnover and musical evolution. This is a moving novel about two people finding the strength to move forward together."—Publishers Weekly"Pavli delivers a soulful debut novel about love and restoring hope. . . . In prose by turns lyrical and mesmerizing, Pavli taps deeply into what it means to be Black in America, tossing in some surprising narrative tricks along the way."—Booklist"This remarkable project, with its lyrical play and experimental structure, shrinks the moment between event and emotion—as well as the distance between text and experience—down to a dot."—Africa is a Country"Another Kind of Madness is a full-bodied literary achievement bustling with sweat, regret, and sound. Pavli guides his language and characters into holes, onto planes, and through doors Ive never read or imagined. Pavlis narrative audacity and descriptive skill make every sentence and scene in Another Kind of Madness equal parts sorrow song, blues, funk, and of course jazz. Ive not read a novel in recent history that so absolutely blurs, bruises, and complicates the space between mourning and morning. I am wonderfully devastated by the soul, scope, and execution of Another Kind of Madness and thoroughly inspired by this new kind of novel that is as at once wholly innovative and in deep conversation with so many Black American literary traditions."—Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy"Reader beware. You imagine you hold a book in your hands, but it is a song, a rhythm of words and phrases that shudder the soul. You will wander with its wanderers, and every few minutes you will need to put the book down to hear again what you have just read. It is not enough that Chicago, Lamu Town—midwestern American, coastal Kenya—and other worlds shift and shimmer and suck you into the madness the book proposes, but you will depart the text with its lyrics ringing in your heart."—Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, author of Dust"A fiercely vibrant meditation on how the interior life that eludes us returns through the sounds, secrets, and graces of others, through which Pavli rekindles, in his inimitable way, the meanings of lyric and soul."—Emily J. Lordi, author of Black Resonance"Another Kind of Madness is a deliriously gorgeous novel. It is both hallucinatory and cogent, both African and Western, both stormy and gentle, and painted with a language that vibrates the bones. Pavli, whether were talking poetry or prose, is a master vernacularist, an adept cartographer of the human heart, and an artist with such subtle observational dexterity that one might imagine hes directly in touch with the sublime."—Reginald McKnight, author of He Sleeps"Like a song that lingers in memory, Another Kind of Madness offers us a narrative that both moves and refuses to move, that leaps and at times seems to vanish. By this lyrical rhythm, Pavli defines diaspora as here but also everywhere and nowhere. In these pages, Black music sounds and surrounds experience like a mysterious house people long to live in but cant find, a quest where they find themselves ever more deeply involved."—Jeffery Renard Allen, author of Song of the ShankPraise for Who Can Afford to Improvise? James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners"If you read books, sometimes or all the time, for the quality of their sentences (and what writer doesnt? why else would anyone want to be a writer?), Who Can Afford to Improvise is even more essential. Pavli is fucking fearless about how he goes about it, as fearless as any contemporary musician I can think of, as fearless as some of the greats."—CounterpunchPraise for Lets Let That Are Not Yet"As if blown through Coltranes sax, Pavlis words offer hope for a consciousness that will repair the world. Like Coltrane, Pavli makes the deed intimate and soulful. . . . Pavlis poems still seduce like overheard confidences, but they now extend to prose narratives and reports from occupied territories, as James Baldwin once framed it. Pavlis text offers a lyric theater of breaking news from our daily infernos."—New York Times"Pavli blends memoir and lyric in this genre-bending collection, fearlessly exploring the personal and political boundaries of race, history, and heritage."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)Praise for Visiting Hours at the Color Line"The abundant second-person addresses of Pavlis Visiting Hours at the Color Line signal these remarkable poems are in conversation with us: our culture, our history, our ghosts. His is a Hopkins-like sprung rhythm of, not only syntax, but edifying consciousness pulsing in a language of idiomatic lyrics and impressions. Even after enraptured multiple readings, I am incapable of succinctly praising this poets immense talent and this new books urgent, beautiful complexities."—Terrance Hayes"Ever since I discovered Pavlis poetry, I find myself measuring other authors against the steady stream of his voice, and the heart and politics one finds in his short and long lines—the very sound of freedom. There are two or three writers one always looks forward to reading, always, and Pavli, especially in Visiting Hours at the Color Line, is one of them."—Hilton Als"To fully enjoy the sweet complexity and gravity-defying genre blending in Pavlis Visiting Hours at the Color Line, one has to first put aside fears of postmodern tricksterism and fake-outs, then come to believe that talk happens without words. Inside his staunch, idiomatic phrasings and syntactic figurations is a heart bursting with sharp observations and a desire to read the nonverbal signs that point to and record our supreme humanity. Such poetry is deeply personal and masterfully arranged."—Major Jackson"The tension in Pavlis poems is a language-cable wrought to swing you out over unnerving spaces, let you see and hear what they really hold, and bring you back up more alive than you were before."—Adrienne Rich"Theres a beauty embodied in this poets straightforward journey."—Yusef Komunyakaa"Pavli turns to canonical images and tropes but adds blues, jazz, jargon, and slang in a distinctly contemporary and vigorous American idiom. . . . The final long piece, part of the series of prose poems called Verbatim, is marvelous. A dialogue, more play than poem, it is playful, reminiscent of Beckett but more explicitly philosophical. By itself it makes this entire intriguing collection worthwhile."—Booklist Promotional Publisher pitching at sales and academic conferences like Heartland Fall Forum and AWP 2020Major bookseller send to accounts that have sold comparable titles—like A Little Life by Hanya Yanigihara and Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday—well, as well as authors previous collections of poemsAdvertising with Shelf Awareness and Literary HubMajor newsletter and social media promotional push via the publisher, with targeted newsletter outreach to fiction-specific, sales-focused, and academic-focused lists of more than 15,000 contats Long Description Ndiya Grayson returns to her childhood home of Chicago as a young professional, but even her high-end job in a law office cant protect her from half-repressed memories of childhood trauma. One evening, vulnerable and emotionally disarrayed, she goes out and meets her equal and opposite: Shame Luther, a no-nonsense construction worker by day and a self-taught piano player by night. The love story that ensues propels them on an unforgettable journey from Chicagos South Side to the coast of Kenya as they navigate the turbulence of long-buried pasts and an uncertain future. A stirring novel tuned to the clash between soul musics vision of our essential responsibility to each other and a world that breaks us down and tears us apart, Another Kind of Madness is an indelible tale of human connection. Review Quote Praise for Another Kind of Madness "The pleasure of music and ache of language drive [Pavlics] first novel. . . . Characters feed off one another like improvisatory musicians, and, like Finnegans Wake , the book begins at the end and ends just before the beginning." -- Minneapolis Star Tribune "An ode to Chicago, Kenya, and soul music as humanitys worldwide hum . . . In Ed Pavlics remarkable and groundbreaking novel, Another Kind of Madness , literary tropes and images are pried loose." -- Colorado Review "[A] beautiful debut novel . . . Pavlics prose is simple yet lyrical, which strikingly depicts not only the intricacies of Ndiya and Shames relationship, but also a city and its history, as seen through architectural turnover and musical evolution. This is a moving novel about two people finding the strength to move forward together." -- Publishers Weekly "Pavlic delivers a soulful debut novel about love and restoring hope. . . . In prose by turns lyrical and mesmerizing, Pavlic taps deeply into what it means to be Black in America, tossing in some surprising narrative tricks along the way." -- Booklist "This remarkable project, with its lyrical play and experimental structure, shrinks the moment between event and emotion--as well as the distance between text and experience--down to a dot." --Africa is a Country " Another Kind of Madness is a full-bodied literary achievement bustling with sweat, regret, and sound. Pavlic guides his language and characters into holes, onto planes, and through doors Ive never read or imagined. Pavlics narrative audacity and descriptive skill make every sentence and scene in Another Kind of Madness equal parts sorrow song, blues, funk, and of course jazz. Ive not read a novel in recent history that so absolutely blurs, bruises, and complicates the space between mourning and morning. I am wonderfully devastated by the soul, scope, and execution of Another Kind of Madness and thoroughly inspired by this new kind of novel that is as at once wholly innovative and in deep conversation with so many Black American literary traditions." --Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy "Reader beware. You imagine you hold a book in your hands, but it is a song, a rhythm of words and phrases that shudder the soul. You will wander with its wanderers, and every few minutes you will need to put the book down to hear again what you have just read. It is not enough that Chicago, Lamu Town--midwestern American, coastal Kenya--and other worlds shift and shimmer and suck you into the madness the book proposes, but you will depart the text with its lyrics ringing in your heart." --Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, author of Dust "A fiercely vibrant meditation on how the interior life that eludes us returns through the sounds, secrets, and graces of others, through which Pavlic rekindles, in his inimitable way, the meanings of lyric and soul." --Emily J. Lordi, author of Black Resonance "Another Kind of Madness is a deliriously gorgeous novel. It is both hallucinatory and cogent, both African and Western, both stormy and gentle, and painted with a language that vibrates the bones. Pavlic, whether were talking poetry or prose, is a master vernacularist, an adept cartographer of the human heart, and an artist with such subtle observational dexterity that one might imagine hes directly in touch with the sublime." --Reginald McKnight, author of He Sleeps "Like a song that lingers in memory, Another Kind of Madness offers us a narrative that both moves and refuses to move, that leaps and at times seems to vanish. By this lyrical rhythm, Pavlic defines diaspora as here but also everywhere and nowhere. In these pages, Black music sounds and surrounds experience like a mysterious house people long to live in but cant find, a quest where they find themselves ever more deeply involved." --Jeffery Renard Allen, author of Song of the Shank Praise for Who Can Afford to Improvise? James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners "If you read books, sometimes or all the time, for the quality of their sentences (and what writer doesnt? why else would anyone want to be a writer?), Who Can Afford to Improvise is even more essential. Pavlic is fucking fearless about how he goes about it, as fearless as any contemporary musician I can think of, as fearless as some of the greats." -- Counterpunch Praise for Lets Let That Are Not Yet "As if blown through Coltranes sax, Pavlics words offer hope for a consciousness that will repair the world. Like Coltrane, Pavlic makes the deed intimate and soulful. . . . Pavlics poems still seduce like overheard confidences, but they now extend to prose narratives and reports from occupied territories, as James Baldwin once framed it. Pavlics text offers a lyric theater of breaking news from our daily infernos." -- New York Times "Pavlic blends memoir and lyric in this genre-bending collection, fearlessly exploring the personal and political boundaries of race, history, and heritage." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review) Praise for Visiting Hours at the Color Line "The abundant second-person addresses of Pavlics Visiting Hours at the Color Line signal these remarkable poems are in conversation with us: our culture, our history, our ghosts. His is a Hopkins-like sprung rhythm of, not only syntax, but edifying consciousness pulsing in a language of idiomatic lyrics and impressions. Even after enraptured multiple readings, I am incapable of succinctly praising this poets immense talent and this new books urgent, beautiful complexities." --Terrance Hayes "Ever since I discovered Pavlics poetry, I find myself measuring other authors against the steady stream of his voice, and the heart and politics one finds in his short and long lines--the very sound of freedom. There are two or three writers one always looks forward to reading, always, and Pavlic, especially in Visiting Hours at the Color Line , is one of them." --Hilton Als "To fully enjoy the sweet complexity and gravity-defying genre blending in Pavlics Visiting Hours at the Color Line , one has to first put aside fears of postmodern tricksterism and fake-outs, then come to believe that talk happens without words. Inside his staunch, idiomatic phrasings and syntactic figurations is a heart bursting with sharp observations and a desire to read the nonverbal signs that point to and record our supreme humanity. Such poetry is deeply personal and masterfully arranged." --Major Jackson "The tension in Pavlics poems is a language-cable wrought to swing you out over unnerving spaces, let you see and hear what they really hold, and bring you back up more alive than you were before." --Adrienne Rich "Theres a beauty embodied in this poets straightforward journey." --Yusef Komunyakaa "Pavlic turns to canonical images and tropes but adds blues, jazz, jargon, and slang in a distinctly contemporary and vigorous American idiom. . . . The final long piece, part of the series of prose poems called Verbatim, is marvelous. A dialogue, more play than poem, it is playful, reminiscent of Beckett but more explicitly philosophical. By itself it makes this entire intriguing collection worthwhile." -- Booklist Excerpt from Book And after how many speeches to herself about what not to do? Things not to do such as, first and foremost, meet anyone, much less someone, at a basement party? After all of that, Ndiya Grayson met Shame Luther at a basement party. It was the Fourth of July, a Sunday. Well, by the time they met it was early Monday morning. Over the next month shed seen him twice. This night would be the third time. Ndiya promised herself to review the two previous occasions so she could make the third time turn out different. What does that mean, "turn out"? "At least give it a chance to happen," shed thought to herself. As for Shame, OK, she thought, "Its some-kind-of-his-name." Thats what it said on the flyer Yvette-at-work brought to show her on Tuesday, after Ndiyas email about having met him at the party: NIGHT VISIONS : CATCH SHAME LUTHER: WEDNESDAY NIGHTS @ THE CAT EYE. The glossy card featured a yellow cat eye superimposed over a piano. She slid it across Ndiyas desk without a pause in her step, " This your basement boy, girl? Watch yourself with musicians." And no she didnt just keep walking. Musicians? Shame hadnt mentioned the music part when they met. He said he was a laborer. He recited it as if standing at attention: "International Laborers Union, Local 269." She had no idea what that meant. As they shook hands on the porch, shed managed, "Yeah? Wheres that?" She noticed the callused skin of his palm and the thick, smooth feel of his fingers. His hand felt like it wore a glove of itself. "Well, the locals in Chicago Heights. But for a few more weeks," he said, " that , the work, is a wire mill out west up on Thirty-Eighth Street." " Up on Thirty-Eighth?" she thought. He said the name, "Joycelan Steel." She remembered the name because she didnt know what a wire mill was and because the name, Joycelan Steel, sounded like a person shed want to meet. Names: Shame Luther and Joycelan Steel. The union, the local, the work? None of it sounded real. On her guard that first night, she didnt ask him anything more about what or where or why he did whatever he did. She didnt ask. She was trying to keep it simple. She failed. * And at night, the city arched its back. Its eyes faded to slits, front limbs stretched out. The claws became invisible, likewise the scars. The heat eased as the day gave up. Motion ensued where everything except scars rests. Scars took over and attempted to redeem the day. A telephone pole begged the cleat back its divots. Things no river could forgive vanished. They didnt disappear. Just slipped up inside of wherever they were for a while. Its like the way you fold a piece of paper in half, trace your thumbnail down the crease until its sharp enough that the missing half of the page fills the room and theres nothing else to breathe. They say a person experiences a rush of pure elation at the exact moment of drowning. At twilight, in the summer, the day drowned in the dark. Pieces of elation came alive, parcels of fugitive heat. Invisible streams of it moved around, lolled about in the streets, paused without pausing on stoops. So for a few minutes at dusk the city opened. It was as if all the promises of invisibility existed without the terrors. The terrors came later, of course; enough to break a bent beam of light. But for a half hour or so around sunset after a hot day, it was pure drowning. Ndiya Grayson got off the bus to go see Shame Luther at twilight. She stepped into this place hed found to live where elation hung out longer than it did elsewhere. Where life was wound into what happened on the missing half of the page. Its why she arrived by descending degrees, presence terraced. Its why she was already gone by the time she found she couldnt leave. Had never left. Long gone and never left; she held, as it were, the American ticket. To tell it means to unfold the untold. The sky glowed overhead, the orange clouds of a night in late summer, Chicago. The hiss as the bus knelt down. It dipped its bumper into the huge puddle left over from the afternoons gushing fire hydrants on three of the four corners at the intersection. Its just a few world-changing blocks east from the corner of Sixty-Third and King Drive, a few minutes walk. As shed learn later, a few minutes walk into a past shed never had, her past. There was no place in the city like it and no place in the city was close. No police of place, fences buried underground. She noticed it right off. She remembered it with the feeling that it was remembering her. Shed ask Shame about it when she and Mrs. Claras Melvin finally got inside his door. Hed take Melvins goggles and her thigh-length linen coat and try not to notice, just yet, her soaked high-heels and dripping skirt. Hed say, "Yeah, this is where all the citys twilight comes to stay the night. And, do you know, there are places that have none at all? We get theirs too. Isnt that right, Melvin?" Melvin was oblivious in his red swim trunks with blue sailboats. He rocked back and forth on the outside edge of his sandals and held one yellow rain boot by its pull-on loop in each hand. Shame: "A little payback." And she: "Payback? For what?" And Shame, smiling at the hallway outside the open door behind her: "Come on in." All of that was still a bus stop and a three-block walk away. Itd seem to her that it took half her life to walk those three blocks. In a way, she was right about that. But for now she was still on the eastbound 29 bus. She was still dry, hadnt felt the fitted glove of air. So she hadnt asked herself anything yet. Yet. The word seemed laced into all her time with Shame. Call it "time." Hers with him seemed to be built of delay. Every moment shackled to its mirror in a kind of tug of war between this and that, here and there. Things took forever to happen. They happened when they happened and never felt late. Then the bizarre part, they happened again and again--and so really happened--later in her brain. Ndiyas memories of time with Shame stood out like colorized scenes in a black-and-white film. No. They were like parts of a movie that shed encountered first as music and so could never really take the movie version seriously. Itd be weeks before she asked herself much at all about Shame Luther. But when she did shed find music where she thought there was vision, touch where she thought there should be music. And whenever there was supposed to be touch she found a part of her life that had nothing to do with him at all. She hadnt thought it through, refused to in fact. So she knows all of this in a way she cant tell herself about. Known without the telling to self. Words evaporated into what lay behind them before her brain caught the voice. Absorbed, maybe. But then what? As she moved up the aisle to the back door of the bus, she felt like she was already in the street. The crushing heat of the afternoon was gone. She loved the summer heat at night, the way the whole city stretched out in strings of light, turned its back and breathed long and quiet. * Breath in slow motion. Easy as this here. The mute pressure of heat lightning. The way a city slipped its pulse into you. This was a South Side summer night and the difference, that is, the memory, struck her immediately when shed come back at the beginning of the summer. Ndiya had sworn she wouldnt come back to Chicago, not until they tore The Grave down. Somewhere in herself she believed they never would. From all what theyd stole into her as a child, shed assumed they never could come down. From all what theyd torn--in her mind, something in how shed been sent away had made the buildings indestructible. Now they had come down. It was national, international news when theyd decided to tear down the projects where shed grown up. It was journalism; she had her doubts. But here she was. True to her word. True to the word. "Here" she was, back in this city that shed forced to forget her name. So she thought. Immediately upon her arrival, shed found that "here" was a verb. She felt "hered." The first thing she noticed about this verb was that it hurt. And the hurt twisted into colors, a kind of bouquet in her arms and legs. The bouquets changed her pulse, sharpened her vision until the colors in the world began to switch places: blue bars from the city flag on a police car swooped up into the sky; red from the stripe on a passing bus caught and wrapped around parked cars; silver green from trees in the park blown into the air making the wind momentarily visible. Here was musical. When the colors "hered" their way around playing musical chairs, she noticed, they didnt hurt anymore. Here bristled and sparkled. But it wasnt pain. She learned that all kind of things, voices in daily, anonymous speech more than anything else, had the power to here her. All summer voices in crowds of people jousted about until she lost track of which voice came from which face. "Where is this here?" she repeated to herself as she checked to see if the strange lightning in her arms and legs was visible to people around her. Didnt seem to be. More than twenty years shed lived in other places. She found that "there" was a verb too. Shed felt all kinds of "theres" and "thereings," the ways people could unknowingly there her. All kinds of ways. At every new job, people asking her the question and--without noticing Ndiyas face--answering, "Chicago? Great place. Oh, I love Chicago, the Art Institute and we have friends in [fill in the name of whatever suburb]." Or it was, "My daughter lives near Wrigley Field." Ndiya wondered how everyones fucking daughter could live near Wrigley Field? At first, s Description for Sales People Hardcover release was lauded by major literary figures like Kiese Laymon, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, and Emily J. Lordi, and authors previous work has been reviewed by the New York Times and lauded by major literary figures like Terrance Hayes, Adrienne Rich, Hilton Als, and Yusek Komunyakaa Author is well-respected in literary and music communities and has been commissioned to write and present on major artists like Aretha Franklin Hardcover was widely reviewed by Minneapolis Star Tribune , Booklist , Publishers Weekly , and Africa is a Country Books focus on race, police brutality, discriminatory housing crises, trauma, jaz, and the city of Chicago provides opportunities for wider coverage, crossover into larger markets, and inclusion in national conversations surrounding these topics Details ISBN1571311343 Pages 424 Publisher Milkweed Editions Year 2020 ISBN-10 1571311343 ISBN-13 9781571311344 Format Paperback Imprint Milkweed Editions Subtitle A Novel Place of Publication Minneapolis Country of Publication United States DEWEY 813.6 Language English Publication Date 2020-05-28 NZ Release Date 2020-05-28 US Release Date 2020-05-28 UK Release Date 2020-05-28 Alternative 9781571311283 Audience General AU Release Date 2020-04-30 Author Ed Pavli Illustrations Illustrations We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. 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