Late Arcade

From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate #5

by Nathaniel Mackey

A new volume of the singular, ongoing, great American jazz novel  Nathaniel Mackey’s Late Arcade opens in Los Angeles. A musician known only as N. writes the first of a series of letters to the enigmatic Angel of Dust. N.’s jazz sextet, Molimo m’Atet, has just rehearsed a new the horn players read from The Egyptian Book of the Dead with lips clothespinned shut, while the rest of the band struts and saunters in a cosmic hymn to the sun god Ra. N. ends this breathless session by sending the Angel of Dust a cassette tape of their rehearsal. Over the next nine months, N.’s epistolary narration follows the musical goings-on of the ensemble. N. suffers from what he calls “cowrie shell at- tacks”―oil spills, N.’s memory of his mother’s melancholy musical Sundays― which all becomes the source of fresh artistic invention. Here is the newest installment of the National Book Award-winner Nathaniel Mackey’s From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate , the great American jazz novel of “exquisite rhythmic lyricism” ( Bookforum ). 

Genres: Fiction, Poetry

224 pages, Paperback

Published February 28, 2017

About the author

Poet and novelist Nathaniel Mackey was born in 1947 in Miami, Florida. He received a BA degree from Princeton University and a PhD from Stanford University.

Nathaniel Mackey has received numerous awards including a Whiting Writer’s Award and a 2010 Guggenheim fellowship. He is the Reynolds Price Professor of English at Duke University and served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2001 to 2007. Mackey currently lives in Durham, North Carolina.

Reviews

[John O'Neill · Rating 5 out of 5]

exhilarating. does for music what huysmans did for perfume and flowers, which is about as high a compliment as i can imagine.

[Donald Quist · Rating 3 out of 5]

My review at Publishers Weekly
https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-...