Join us to celebrate Pathetic Literature, an anthology collected and edited by Eileen Myles.
excerpt from the introduction to Pathetic Literature
In general poems are pathetic and diaries are pathetic. Really Literature is pathetic. Ask anyone who doesn’t care about literature. They would agree. If they bothered at all.
Perhaps the only accomplishment here is I’m saying that as an insider. This book is kind of a hollow. All these pieces of the rock (meaning Literature) long and short are just what I like. The invention of pathetic literature surely is Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow Book. More than a thousand years ago she kept her diaries, her interminable and adorable lists, her sovereignty to herself. Being discovered, she admits, kind of ruined things.
In light of our different pace I’d say we’re ready for ruin.
Eileen Myles (b. 1949, they/them) is a poet, novelist and art journalist whose practice of vernacular first-person writing has become a touchstone for the identity-fluid internet age. Pathetic Literature, which they edited is out in November from Grove Press. They live in New York and Marfa, TX. Their fiction includes Chelsea Girls (1994), Cool for You (2000), Inferno (a poet’s novel) (2010) and Afterglow (2017). Writing on art was gathered in the volume The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art (2009). Books of poetry include Evolution (2018) and I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems 1975-2014 and in Spring 2023 a “Working Life” will be released upon the world. They take pictures which they’ve shown at Bridget Donahue & in Provincetown at Schoolhouse Gallery. Their super-8 road film “The Trip” is on YouTube. They live in New York & in Marfa, TX.
Praise for Pathetic Literature
“For the quirky and the weird—and who among us is not?—this singularly unexpected assemblage curated by Lambda Award–winning poet and writer Eileen Myles is an anthology like no other . . . What Myles has captured here is simply this: the power of literature.”—Oprah Daily
“Huge—and (I hope) hugely influential . . . A collection that makes an argument or, even more, aspires to frame a counter-tradition of literature . . . An anthology rich in allusions: One piece speaks to another across geography and time . . . The weave is so all-encompassing, the associations so multilayered, that I feel like fireworks are popping off inside my head . . . Pathetic Literature represents not so much a collection as it does an ethos: ‘almost a poem,’ its creator observes. These texts and voices take us someplace unexpected, beyond the individual and into the realm of a collective, a tapestry of words that add up to a way of being in the world.”—David Ulin, Los Angeles Times
“Pathetic Literature surpasses six hundred pages without ever seeming bloated. The book’s ample size gestures to the enormity of the pathetic as an organizing principle or theme, an ecumenical affect that has no fealty to period, place, or genre . . . Thrilling in its unerring quality and lurching pace, Myles’s engaging collection encompasses essays, poems, short stories, letters, and book excerpts from over one hundred authors connected to movements ranging from Magical Realism to the Black Radical Tradition to Romanticism . . . Rejecting the urge to erase, minimize, or turn away from an unsightly feeling, the writers included in this anthology audaciously inhabit a sentiment that society exhorts its high-functioning citizenry to disown. The beautiful, weird aggregate that results is profoundly, pathetically human.”—Cassie Packard, Brooklyn Rail
“Bits and bobs to make you feel, excerpted from poems, plays, and prose, from Franz Kafka to Porochista Khakpour.”—Vanity Fair
“This far-flung, idiosyncratic collection of transgressive poems, plays, and prose is laser-focused on celebrating the outsider. The result is a resplendent affirmation of humanity that has become so essential and necessary today. In the acknowledgments, Myles hints that Too Pathetic might be forthcoming. Let’s hope so.”—ArtsFuse
“In this powerful anthology, poet Myles shares a wide-ranging but deeply focused reading list linked by the concept of pathos . . . The collection amounts to a solid argument for the value of literature that lays bare its author’s personal investment.”—Publishers Weekly
Photo by Peggy O’Brien