Proper Name & Other Stories - Bernadette Mayer

Proper Name collects for the first time the inimitable stories of Bernadette Mayer––“one of the most original writers of her generation” (The Washington Post).

The nineteen narratives of Proper Name include “My Excellent Novel,” “Ice Cube Epigrams,” “Essay: How Carefully Do We Tend?” and “Juan Gave Nora a Pomegranate.” Mayer’s structural inventions are terrific and unique. As Fanny Howe remarked in The American Book Review, “In a language made up of idiom and lyricism, Mayer cancels the boundaries between prose and poetry.”

“Bernadette Mayer is an independent experimental writer who likes to bounce artballs off traditional walls.“
––Jackson Mac Low

“One of the most interesting, exciting and open of late-20th-century experimental poets... Mayer pleads the case of a natural state of passionate grace and surprising vision whose mimetic signature is the lively unpredictable richness of her verbal surfaces.“
––Tom Clark, San Francisco Chronicle

“A poet of extraordinary inventiveness, erotic energy and challenge, and ironic intelligence.“
––Michael Palmer

“Mayer's work is marked with Dorothy Parker's bite and bawdiness and Gertrude Stein's inventive discourse.“
––The Antioch Review

Published by New Directions, 1996
Cover collage/painting by Joe Brainard
Design by Sylvia Frezzolini Severance
Paperbook, 152 pages
ISBN: 978-0811213257
13 x 20 cm