| "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 purchase softcover from amazon.com purchase first edition deluxe hardcover with slipcase |
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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) purchase clown chapters audio CD purchase softcover from barnes & noble |
"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) purchase softcover from amazon.com purchase hardcover from amazon.com |
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 |
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| 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 order the ABCs from BüK for only $1.49 |
![]() first 10 entries of The DEFGs from Grossman's Glossary order the DEFGs from BüK for only $1.49 |
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![]() book description ten business poems order tycoon boy first edition 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 |
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| © 2003-08 Richard Grossman | ||||||