"The Animals is a consummate performance. The objective of voicing the aspirations of the planet, employing the great brotherhood-sisterhood of the animals as a metaphor which reaches inward to the Earth and outward to Humanity is one that demands that this book be considered in the company of other works by Chaucer, Dante, Milton, Blake, Whitman, and Williams."
--James Bertolino, The Ohio Review

book description

ten animal poems

ten shepherd poems

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  "I have dreamt of a book, not a book that tells a story, not even one that tells story upon story, all of them intertwining and changing one another's meanings, but a book that simply is everything. And means everything. To my delight, Richard Grossman's novel is one of these perfect books or dreams."
--Kathy Acker

book description

ten interesting pages (pdf)

Hear Richard Grossman read from the Clown Chapters:


clown chapter excerpt read by mr. grossman (mp3)

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  "The Book of Lazarus is a novel that ought to change the direction of American publishing."
--The Nation


"If an artist's task is indeed, as Beckett claimed, to 'find a form to accommodate the mess,' then Grossman has certainly done it, with an exceptional feat of choreography and a radical vision for the possibilities of fiction."
--The Village Voice


book description

ten interesting pages (pdf)

seventy-page sentence (book excerpt)

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  In progress: Hell, purgatory, and finally salvation--Breeze Avenue--a 3,000,000 page novel that is the final book in the American Letters Trilogy.

book description

hodge in heaven, english

hodge in heaven, yiddish (pdf)

podge in hell,english

podge in hell, latin
 
           
             
  Author’s Note

On the following pages are the ABCs (and DEFGs) from a glossary that I began working on in 1989, at the time of the publication of the second edition of The Oxford English Dictionary. It was my original intention to limit my efforts to reading every entry contained in its twenty thousand pages, noting each word that I found humorous or could make humorous by grouping it with other words beginning with the same letter. I also included a number of foreign words that appeared in the dictionary, since they are considered by lexicographers to have been incorporated into our language.

Once I finished the OED, I was having too much fun to abandon the project, and so I continued reading through numerous other dictionaries and incorporating other terms.

To the best of my ability, I have now compiled a list of every humorous word in the English language. The definitions are true to the meanings, albeit expressed with my own slightly demented spin.

RG
 

first 10 entries of The ABCs from Grossman's Glossary

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first 10 entries of The DEFGs from Grossman's Glossary

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book description

ten business poems

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first published volume, 1977
(limited availability)
  "...I was working as a corporate executive, and one of the groups that reported to me was 'Information Services' aka the computer department. Our mainframe, manufactured by National Cash Register, was a behemoth bolted to an elevated floor, in a cooled room surrounded by compressed gas, and fed with stacks of cards. From my vantage point I hated the machine, because I clearly saw how its presence had devalued and lobotomized people. In 1973, I wrote 'The Death of a Computer Operator,' which was included in my first volume of poetry, Tycoon Boy:
 
Working the graveyard shift he dug
his grave in our tape vault strapping his chin
to the side of a rack:
his knees hung six inches off the ground.

Everybody said he was meticulous
and that he did everything correctly up until the day
he died. His handwriting, according to the Coroner,
was firm.

He worked for us for over a year
turning out massive amounts of information
late at night
but when we called to notify his mother that we cut him
down she said

keep the body.


The man who had committed suicide in our basement, and I do not mean to belittle his death in any way by this remark, was to my mind a sacrificial victim to the New Moloch, which appears to us now in the hydra-headed form of Bill Gates and a hundred million other dweebs--people without character or culture, spinning out their meaningless systems in a moneyed world of spineless dolls. The anonymity of the suicide, occurring while the machine that he served hummed at his side, struck me as more than heartless. I could not conceive at the time of a more vapid way of dying. With the passage of years, the uneasiness I felt at the degradation of this man's death has grown into a pervasive malaise, triggered by the quasi-instantaneous reorganization of our environment, where natural surroundings, with their natural dangers, are being replaced with static, risk-free, tasteless, moronic, computer-engendered spaces, replete with designated emotional repositories. Ours is no longer a society based on class domination; it is a society based on system domination, whose armature and armament is the glorified calculator."

from an article by Mr. Grossman in
rain taxi
 
     
  © 2003-08 Richard Grossman