The Collected Fiction

by Kenneth Koch, Jordan Davis (Introduction)

“It’s lucky for us all that you’re holding Koch’s collected fiction in your hands right now. Koch’s seasons on our earth were blessed ones and these traces, some of them among his last, are gifts.”—Jonathan Lethem Hilarious and profoundly moving, this volume restores to print all the fiction of the writer John Ashbery called “simply the best we have.” Koch, who once characterized New York School writing as about “the fullness and richness of possibility and excitement and happiness,” imbues his prose with humor, wit, and a beautifully tender exuberance. The Collected Fiction of Kenneth Koch is a must-read for anyone interested in discovering what American literature might still hope to be. Published simultaneously with The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch (Knopf), Collected Fiction includes Koch’s innocent and rambunctious novel The Red Robins , as well as Hotel Lambosa , his book of semi-autobiographical short pieces inspired equally by Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories and Yasunari Kawabata’s Palm-of-the-Hand Stories . Fans of Koch’s unparalleled gift for comic invention will turn immediately to “The New Orleans Stories,” a cycle about the family of a small-time criminal, published here for the first time along with “The Soviet Room,” a gentle story of requited love at the end of the Cold War. Koch’s previously uncollected work includes a warm-hearted parody of a children’s adventure narrative and a story detailing the mysteries uncovered by an obsessive postcard detective. Together, the work of Kenneth Koch opens up a wonderful world—one where the pursuit of happiness is taken very seriously indeed. Kenneth Koch was born in Cincinnati and served in the South Pacific during World War II. A poet, playwright, novelist, and Columbia University professor, Koch also published several books about teaching and reading poetry, including the groundbreaking Wishes, Lies, and Dreams ; Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? ; and Making Your Own The Pleasures of Reading and Writing Poetry . He was the recipient of the Bollingen Prize and the Bobbitt Library of Congress Prize, a finalist for the National Book Award, and winner of the Phi Beta Kappa Poetry Award.

394 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2005

About the author

Kenneth Koch is most often recognized as one of the four most prominent poets of the 1950s-1960s poetic movement "the New York School of Poetry" along with Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery and James Schuyler. The New York School adopted the avant-garde movement in a style often called the "new" avant-garde, drawing on Abstract Expressionism, French surrealism and stream-of-consciousness writing in the attempt to create a fresh genre free from cliché. In his anthology The New York Poets, Mark Ford writes, "In their reaction against the serious, ironic, ostentatiously well-made lyric that dominated the post-war poetry scene, they turned to the work of an eclectic range of literary iconoclasts, eccentrics and experimenters."

Fiercely anti-academic and anti-establishment, Koch's attitude and aesthetic were dubbed by John Ashbery his "missionary zeal." Ford calls him "the New York School poet most ready to engage in polemic with the poetic establishment, and the one most determined to promote the work of himself and his friends to a wider audience." Koch died of leukemia at age 77, leaving a legacy of numerous anthologies of both short and long poems, avant-garde plays and short stories, in addition to nonfiction works dealing with aesthetics and teaching poetry to children and senior citizens.

Reviews

[Peter Landau · Rating 4 out of 5]

People need meaning. We’re meaning machines. But I’m always trying to avoid storytelling, it’s necessary but false. Reading the Collected Fiction of Kenneth Koch helps.

[Ebenmaessiger · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Beverly Boys’ Summer Vacation”: 5
- Tough, when a story chooses a direction that sacrifices pleasure for a point, and you understand — either intuitively or eventually — precisely that point, and you take it in and mull it over, and maybe even appreciate it, and meanwhile the story just keeps going along, making that point over and over yet making no complementary pleasure along the way (except, perhaps, the hollow vicarious pleasure of observing one see a task through to the end, although that’s hardly compensatory at all, is it? Somewhat like the difference between watching someone complete a marathon and doing the thing yourself). That’s this. He’s amplifying the naive enthusiasm of children’s literature (NOT, note, satirizing or repurposing it; the sincerity of the project is the project itself. Indeed, it likewise doesn’t engage in [much] of that twee prose voice of affected simplicity so favored by certain “literary” authors, as that meta-technique would, again, distract from the point, which is not to employ but to embody the Jack-and-Jill voice) in order to signal the possibility of unvarnished narrative joy. Huzzah. STORY: some boys and their aunt enjoy the woods and a new friend during a lazy hazy summer vacay.