Genoa (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781566893923)

"[Genoa] invites us to pass our minds down a new but ancient track, to become, ourselves, both fact and fiction, and to discover something true about the geography of time."--William Gass, The New York Times

"Genoa is a spectacular confrontation with Melville's work, the journals of Columbus and molecular biology--all folded into a hallucinatory narrative about two brothers and their different paths through the American century."--Publishers Weekly

"Much like his great-grandfather, Herman Melville, Paul Metcalf brings an extraordinary diversity of materials into the complex patterns of analogy and metaphor, to affect a common term altogether brilliant in its imagination."--Robert Creeley

"A unique work of historical and literary imagination, eloquent and powerful. I know of nothing like it."--Howard Zinn

First published in 1965, Genoa is Paul Metcalf's purging of the burden of his relationship to his great-grandfather Herman Melville. In his signature polyphonic style, a storm-tossed Indiana attic becomes the site of a reckoning with the life of Melville; with Columbus, and his myth; and between two brothers--one, an MD who refuses to practice; the other, an executed murderer. Genoa is a triumph, a novel without peer, that vibrates and sings a quintessentially American song.

Paul Metcalf (1917-99) was an American writer and the great-grandson of Herman Melville. His three volume Collected Works were published by Coffee House Press in 1996.

Author: Paul Metcalf
ISBN-10: 1566893925
ISBN-13: 9781566893923
Publisher: Coffee House Press
Language: English
Published: 07/14/2015
Pages: 264
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.60lbs
Size: 8.20h x 5.40w x 0.70d

Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 05/15/2015