Reader in Projectile Vomiting

by Ed Anger

A survey of the literature, in fictive, poetic, and prose forms, of projectile vomiting, from the pre-Socratics to the Beats and beyond.

612 pages, hardcover

First published January 1, 2007

Reviews

[Mateo · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Penguin Library Modern Classics Reader in Projectile Vomiting, now in its fourth reprinting, has been the standard survey reference work on the subject since its initial appearance in June of this year. Edited and annotated by professor Edward Anger of the University of Mid-Ohio's Bodily Fluids Discharge in Literature program, it provides perhaps the finest single-volume guide to any projectile vomiting collection since E.M. Hormby's classic 1937 Studies in Spewing.

Beginning with a fragment of verse by Sappho ("... and which of the gods / by the nectar of wine / has not / barfed / O my love") and a hitherto unknown play by Aristophanes (The Vomiters of Delphi) and continuing through St. Thomas Aquinas (who declared that upchucking was "the inward masses of the body attempting to reach heavenward for God's grace"), to Isaac Newton, Spinoza, Kant, Nietzsche (whose ubermensch could supposedly vomit his own mouth), Auden, Eliot, and finally to Kerouac ("it's vomit, man, vomit everywhere, that's all there is, vomit like the seas and the stars and the endless road, vomit, that's what we're chasing") and beyond, this tome collects virtually every important work on vomiting over the past 3,000 years.

If I have one complaint about the book, it's that it's needlessly Euro-centric; where are the vomit poems of Li Po, the spewing tales of Lady Murasaki, the hurling stories of Borges? Perhaps this is an oversight that can be corrected in the next edition (due in two weeks).

[Liquidlasagna]

i think this book is a fiction