Late Arcade [Paperback]

A literary adventure of the highest order, a feat of prose and imagination that takes the fiction genre into new territory. Once of the most memorable meetings of prose and jazz in English literature. Singular, ongoing, great American jazz novel.Mackey has now written close to one thousand pages of fiction aboutmusic that does not exist....What is so revolutionary about it, still,is the way Mackey makes the pain of this absence into the occasion forrenewing a love of language, of redirecting our ears toward thepage...[His] handling of history is subtle and immaculate.Exquisite rhythmic lyricismA major work of experimental and philosophical fiction....an ongoing meditation on black cultural production writ large.Mackeyisnt simply playing the part of a poetrecounting jazz, hes fully engagedin the creation of its written iteration,his script a study of rhythm, flow,freedom and, yes, discipline, hiswords as expressive and imaginativeas Coltranes or Colemans mostdeviously-conceived notes.A poetic lift...wild, free-wheeling spirit...Through the treatment of avant-garde jazz as sonically improvised sentences, Nathaniel Mackeys,?Late Arcade, exhibits a boundless and complicated metamorphosis in which musicality becomes the very language which attempts to describe it. An eight month series of letters written by N. to a peculiar confidant known as, The Angel of Dust, relays the appearance of mystical, if not erotically charged, balloons, whose ability to share the subjective experiences of N.s bandmates results in both performances and identities gaining a greater sense of cosmic locality. Instead of accepting the casual clich?s which plague musical writing, Mackey adapts a set of stylistics which are uniquely his own: much like those breaths which are prodigiously pushed out of a tenor, a trumpet, or an oboe, the?words read as chaotic, harmonious, suspensions of the spirit which one must hear before they may fully inhabit.Nathaniel Mackey is a poet ol3Y