Nathaniel Mackey's Late Arcade opens in Los Angeles. A musician known only as N. writes the first of a series of letters to the enigmatic Angel of Dust. N.'s jazz sextet, Molimo m'Atet, has just rehearsed a new tune: the horn players read from The Egyptian Book of the Dead with lips clothes pinned shut, while the rest of the band struts and saunters in a cosmic hymn to the sun god Ra. N. ends this breathless session by sending the Angel of Dust a cassette tape of their rehearsal.
Over the next nine months, N.'s epistolary narration follows the musical goings-on of the ensemble. N. suffers from what he calls "cowrie shell at- tacks"--oil spills, N.'s memory of his mother's melancholy musical Sundays-- which all becomes the source of fresh artistic invention.
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Here is the newest installment of the National Book Award-winner Nathaniel Mackey's From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, the great American jazz novel of "exquisite rhythmic lyricism" (Bookforum).
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W. W. Norton & Company, 2017
Nathaniel Mackey was born in Miami, Florida, in 1947, and grew up, from age four, in California. He received a B.A. from Princeton University in 1969 and a Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1975. He is the author of thirteen chapbooks of poetry, 6 books of poetry, and the five-volume work of fiction From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate. He is also the author of two books of criticism, Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews (University of Iowa Press, 2018) the most recent. Strick: Song of the Andoumboulou 16-25, a compact disc recording of poems read with musical accompaniment (Royal Hartigan, percussion; Hafez Modirzadeh, reeds and flutes), was released in 1995 by Spoken Engine Company; Stray: A Graphic Tone, a vinyl LP of poetry and commentary, was released by Fonograf Editions/ROMA Publications in 2019; Fugitive Equation, a double-CD collaborative performance with The Creaking Breeze Ensemble, was released by Creaking Breeze in 2019. He is the editor of the literary magazine Hambone, a coeditor, with Art Lange, of the anthology Moment’s Notice: Jazz in Poetry and Prose (Coffee House Press, 1993), and a coeditor, with Michael Bough, Kent Johnson and others, of the anthology Resist Much / Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance (Dispatches Editions/Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2017). His honors include the National Book Award for poetry from the National Book Foundation (2006), the Stephen Henderson Award from the African American Literature and Culture Society (2008), the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation (2014), the Bollingen Prize for American Poetry from the Beinecke Library at Yale University (2015), the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Poetry Prize from the Library of Congress (2017), election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2018), and the Nicolás Cristobál Guillén Batista Lifetime Achievement Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association (2024). He lives in Durham, North Carolina, and teaches at Duke University, where he is the Reynolds Price Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing. He has previously taught at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (1974-1976), the University of Southern California (1976-1979), and the University of California, Santa Cruz (1979-2010).
