Gulping's Recital
Russell Edson
Afterword by Mark Tursi
September 30, 2019
ISBN 9780578556031 / Paperback / 140 pages / $13.99

The first-ever reissue of the surreal, absurdist novel by Russell Edson, originally published in 1984 by Guignol Books. Widely recognized as "the godfather of the prose poem in America," Edson is celebrated for poems that employ dark humor and cartoonish surrealism, including The Very Thing That Happens (New Directions, 1964). He also authored the play collection The Falling Sickness (New Directions, 1975) and the novel The Song of Percival Peacock (Coffee House Press, 1992). This edition includes a new afterword and a 2004 interview with Edson conducted by Mark Tursi, author and professor of literature and writing at Marymount Manhattan College and New Jersey City University.

"What makes reading Edson a lasting and worthwhile pleasure is the eccentricity of his vision, his freedom in intermingling objective and subjective realities, his grotesque view of our civilization (or, perhaps, better put, his view of our grotesque civilization), and his wonderful sense of humor."
— Ira Sadoff, Seneca Review

"... Russell Edson is the great comic poet of America. He gives us hilarity of events and people that has turned conventional truths on their respective heads to be seen in new brilliant forms. He is the master of the inappropriate and it is all done magically."
— David Ignatow

"[O]ne of those originals who appear out of the lonesomeness of a vast, thronged country to create a peculiar and defined world ... a world seen as through the wrong end of a spyglass, miniscule but singularly clear."
— Denise Levertov