WRITER DIRECTORY
WRITER DIRECTORY: A BOOK OF ENCOUNTERS
A. ROBERT LEE
This book offers a species of hybrid text, part miniature literary biographies, part figuration and metaphor.
Each portrait is thereby not reluctant to assume its own kind of licence. Not least in calling upon the author’s working part in the equation.
Starting from the fantasy of “meeting” Herman Melville there follow twenty or so selective encounters with writers of a more subsequent time, our own time. Angles, overlaps, tributes.
6×9” | B&W | 100 pp
ISBN 978-8792633460
CATEGORY
Literary criticism
EDITION
Standard paperback 2019 | $17.50
NOTE
100 Encounters series.
REVIEWS
Few books have come my way as generous and wise about writers and writing as this one. The title takes as its model the phonebooks of long ago. But forget that. A. Robert Lee, is a British-born, globe-trotting, retired professor now living in Spain, whose heavy academic laurels disguise a common touch so light that reading him feels as charmed as floating on air. Lee's encounters with more than two dozen writers, famous and not-so-famous, are “part actual profile, part clothed in figuration and metaphor” and always idiosyncratic, enlightening, and entertaining. — JAN HERMAN, Amazon
A. Robert Lee, a prolific scholar and creative writer, has encountered many other authors on all continents. He captures these meetings through memory of revealing, often humorous details - as well as through equally revealing insights into their oeuvres. Who else would interpret the daunting poet W.H. Auden through the lens of the threadbare slippers he guest-lectured in? Or Anne Waldman of Beat fame, "the rolling-speech woman" (her self-label), through the brandish of her colorful shawls? Actually, the secret protagonist of this fascinating book is A. Robert Lee himself, so knowledgeable and perceptive, well worth encountering! — CATHY WAEGNER, Amazon
