Saul Steinberg’s The Labyrinth , first published in 1960 and long out of print, is more than a simple catalog or collection of drawings. These carefully arranged pages record a brilliant, constantly evolving imagination confronting modern life. Here is Steinberg, as he put it at the time, discovering and inventing a great variety of "Illusion, talks, music, women, cats, dogs, birds, the cube, the crocodile, the museum, Moscow and Samarkand (winter, 1956), other Eastern countries, America, motels, baseball, horse racing, bullfights, art, frozen music, words, geometry, heroes, harpies, etc.” This edition, featuring a new introduction by Nicholson Baker, an afterword by Harold Rosenberg, and new notes on the artwork, will allow readers to discover this unique and wondrous book all over again.
Amanda Lohrey is a novelist and essayist. She was educated at the University of Tasmania and Cambridge. She lectured in Writing and Textual Studies at the Sydney University of Technology (1988-1994), and since 2002 at the School of English, Media Studies and Art History at the University of Queensland in Brisbane.