{"product_id":"godlike-isbn-9798896230106","title":"Godlike","description":"\u003cb\u003eAn outrageous spectacle of love between two untamed poets, a 27-year old man and a teenage boy, written by one of America’s original punks and finest writers.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBased on Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine’s notorious affair, but set in the epochal downtown poetry scene of filthy 1970s New York, \u003ci\u003eGodlike\u003c\/i\u003e is a tribute to poetry and the beauty and mess of art, desire, and New York City.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNew York poet Paul Vaughn has a trick for enjoying poetry readings: He simply imagines the reader died a long time ago. Paul is twenty-seven, married, and an admired poet himself. R. T. Wode’s mission is to give offense. He’s also a poet, freshly landed in the city, and, at age sixteen, unknown.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePaul worships T. They embark on a tempestuous affair, dropping acid and crashing parties and perambulating the grit and grime of New York City circa 1972. Paul is in love with T., but T. is in love with experience. Their relationship disintegrates.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA novel of compelling originality and transcendent beauty by legendary musician and poet Richard Hell, \u003ci\u003eGodlike\u003c\/i\u003e transposes the notorious romance of Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud to the East Village in its squalid, glorious ’70s heyday. The book comprises a version of Paul’s 1997 hospital notebooks: diaries amidst poems and essays, along with, most pertinently, the poet’s third-person memoir-novelette of his youthful time with the now-famous T. \u003ci\u003eGodlike\u003c\/i\u003e is infused as well with evocations—and sometimes actual poems—of many New York poets of the era, from Ted Berrigan and Ron Padgett to Edwin Denby and James Schuyler. It achieves a lyricism both profane and profound as it conjures the frenetic vitality as well as the existential malaise of an era. It’s a searching meditation on art, life, love, and the impossibility of everything.\"Raw, refined, superficially slapdash and impeccably constructed, \u003ci\u003eGodlike\u003c\/i\u003e deserves its title by becoming a resonant, multilayered work of literature that goes down easily as pulp. What stuns is that it's much more—a poetry-filled novel about poets so introspective, magnetic and alive that even those who think they hate the stuff will find this book irresistible.\" —Rod Smith, \u003ci\u003eTime Out New York\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Poet and punk pioneer Hell's lyrically melancholy second novel (after \u003ci\u003eGo Now\u003c\/i\u003e), set primarily in the East Village circa 1972, honors decadence and dissolution and celebrates art and angst in a compelling if unsettling story of 27-year-old married poet Paul Vaughn's ('I'm not really a faggot. I just have a queer streak') transcendent affair with a 16-year-old. […] Hell's prose, alternately explosive and tender but always charged with rewarding humanity, ably propels the story. By no means a mainstream effort, this gritty novel will find readers in the demimonde of poets and people who read them, and among those who appreciate how artistry and sexuality can fuel each other.\" —\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Everyone from Liv Tyler to Egon Schiele earns memorable analysis. [Hell] waxes eloquent on cartoons and comic books as paradisal eternity. Birds and God show up hand in hand with Bresson, Dante, and J.Lo. […] Through it all, \u003ci\u003eGodlike\u003c\/i\u003e functions as a downtown guidebook circa 1971 […] More importantly, the text's a literary treatise stitched with shards of [Ron] Padgett, an attempt to locate a gallant geometry verifying love's reality, and proof again that Hell would have carved a smashing oeuvre even if he'd opted to remain plain old Richard Meyers.\" —Brandon Stosuy, \u003ci\u003eVillage Voice\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"This prose, like poetry, moves at the speed of thought and just as awkwardly. Its jangly, nervous, unpredictable music, slipping abruptly between the first person of memoir and a storyteller’s more distanced third person, is thrillingly thin-skinned. Anyone who ever doubted that Hell could achieve with words alone something as compelling as what he’s done with words and music together will have to think again.\" —Barry Schwabsky, \u003ci\u003eGalatea Resurrects\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Careening between a past already hazy with the sensory derangements of seventies downtown New York flaneur-dom and an equally precarious present, [Hell’s] narration shuffles between impossible knowledge of T.’s and others' inner landscapes, and a visceral verisimilitude. […] The morning after T., fresh from Kentucky, first approaches Paul at a poetry reading and they have sex in the apartment Paul shares with his pregnant wife, 'the sun found them out on the floor of the little parlor entangled and gritty, the faint death-smell of the half digested food and alcohol mixing with the brute light; bodies God's idle graffito.’ No cleanliness as godliness around here: smears, smudges, suspect stickiness are ciphers for god, light, transcendence. T., the vomit-spattered, strung-out teen, becomes Him.\" —Leora Lev, \u003ci\u003eAmerican Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"From the beginning, Richard Hell has burned with the same blue flame of misfit insight and desperate beauty.\" —Jerry Stahl, \u003ci\u003eBookforum\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e'[Hell] almost single handedly [created] 'punk' as we know it.... Few people have been as important—yet as underappreciated as Richard Hell. Poet, musician, fashion icon and terrific, terrific writer. Chances are, you have been deeply influenced by Richard Hell your whole life. You just didn’t know it.' —Anthony Bourdain\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"[Hell's] every move and word reveal a naked, impassioned intelligence in the throes of the only truly rock \u0026amp; roll artistic convulsion.\" —Lester Bangs\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Richard Hell is my hero.\" —Dennis Cooper\u003cb\u003eRichard Hell\u003c\/b\u003e first came to public attention in the mid 1970s as an originator of punk. His music albums include \u003ci\u003eBlank Generation\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eDestiny Street\u003c\/i\u003e. In 1984 he retired from music and resumed his original ambition, which was to write books. He is the author of numerous such works of fiction, poetry, essays, notebooks, and autobiography, including \u003ci\u003eThe Voidoid\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eAcross the Years\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eArtifact\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eGo Now\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eHot and Cold\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eI Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eMassive Pissed Love\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eWhat Just Happened\u003c\/i\u003e. He’s also co-author of several collaborative books, including, with songwriter and musician Tom Verlaine, the collection of poems \u003ci\u003eWanna Go Out?\u003c\/i\u003e (published under the heteronym Theresa Stern), and with the artist Christopher Wool the book of image-texts \u003ci\u003ePsychopts\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eRaymond Foye\u003c\/b\u003e is an independent curator, editor, publisher, and writer. In 2020, he received the American Book Award for editing the \u003ci\u003eCollected Poems of Bob Kaufman\u003c\/i\u003e. He is a regular contributor to the \u003ci\u003eGagosian Quarterly\u003c\/i\u003e and a consulting editor with \u003ci\u003eThe Brooklyn Rail\u003c\/i\u003e. He lives in New York City.","brand":"NYRB Classics","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48233198190821,"sku":"NP9798896230106","price":15.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9798896230106.jpg?v=1767728259","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/godlike-isbn-9798896230106","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}