Edson's Mentality

by Russell Edson

NF but light toning along spine, signed by Edson on fep, paper booklet, 25pps, 19 very short tales.

25 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1977

About the author

Russell Edson (December 12, 1928 – April 29, 2014) was an American poet, novelist, writer, and illustrator. He was the son of the cartoonist-screenwriter Gus Edson.

He studied art early in life and attended the Art Students League as a teenager. He began publishing poetry in the 1960s. His honors as a poet include a Guggenheim fellowship, a Whiting Award, and several fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Russell Edson was born in Connecticut in 1935 and lived there with his wife Frances. Edson, who jokingly has called himself "Little Mr. Prose Poem," is inarguably the foremost writer of prose poetry in America, having written exclusively in that form before it became fashionable. In a forthcoming study of the American prose poem, Michel Delville suggests that one of Edson's typical "recipes" for his prose poems involves a modern everyman who suddenly tumbles into an alternative reality in which he loses control over himself, sometimes to the point of being irremediably absorbed--both figuratively and literally--by his immediate and, most often, domestic everyday environment. . . . Constantly fusing and confusing the banal and the bizarre, Edson delights in having a seemingly innocuous situation undergo the most unlikely and uncanny metamorphoses. . . .

Reclusive by nature, Edson has still managed to publish eleven books of prose poems and one novel, The Song of Percival Peacock (available from Coffee House Press).

Reviews

[Glenn Russell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unlike the muck of life, with the rarefied air of theater, an audience is afforded aesthetic distance. Just enough closeness to feel the sting yet far enough away so that everyone can exit the theater in one piece when the lights go up. A truth magnificently expressed by Russell Edson:

WAITING FOR THE FAT LADY TO SING
It was the longest opera ever written. By the time the fat lady sang most of the audience had died in their seats still holding their programs, the theater full of flies and microbes.

Some began to think that perhaps the opera was a bit long, that maybe the fat lady should start singing a little earlier so the audience might have time to write their wills, and to say goodbye to friends and family.

But others felt, what better way to die than waiting for the fat lady to sing in the make-believe of theater, where nothing's real, not the fat lady, nor even death . . .