The book of beginnings and endings / Jenny Boully.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Boully, Jenny.

Language:

English

Physical Description:

xi, 57 pages ; 23 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Louisville, Ky. : Sarabande Books, [2007]

Summary:

How does the story begin? How does it end? This is what The Book of Beginnings and Endings will tell you, but nothing more. The middle-meandering with its arguments, segues, denouement-isn't there. These are beginnings that wave goodbye with the door flung wide open, endings that open in medias res. Throwing her voice in a feat of lyrical ventriloquism, Jenny Boully tunes into every station to open or close more than fifty books ranging in subject matter from physics and astronomy to literary theory and love.

An amazing thing happens when we read these snippets of invented prose, be it an introduction to invertebrate zoology, a "heuristic: account of what is at stake," or the biography of a deceased writer. We are jolted, unhitched, and gradually won over by the author's sense of wonder and loss. The Book of Beginnings and Endings is brilliant, innovative, and, most of all, deeply affecting.

Contents:

4 ...Coda: An infinite singularity, a space for heaving

5 When I first met P.S., he was rehearsing a play

6 ...of some malingering entity

7 My body wasn't taken with me

8 ...of the symbols of fecundity or hope

9 In the beginning, there were many signs

10 ...more permanent fruits, the portraits of the dead

11 A Heuristic Account of What Is at Stake

12 ...a daring carrier pigeon forever circling overhead

13 There ought not to be erasers or cleaning solvents

14 ...that they would all forever stay alive

16 ...bright pollen, beauteous butterflies

17 On the Varieties of Winged Creatures

18 ...on a little, wooden toy horse to play

19 On Probability

20 ...the last account of his having relations with another real human being

21 On the Use of Dialogue in Literature

22 ...into the sympoietic system of that vast otherness

23 They would wait weeks for the sun to rise

24 ...she would refuse to let in the maintenance men

25 It was the particular feel of him that made me want to go back

26 ...somehow still the need to proceed

27 What the reader desires, perhaps even more than the author

28 ...I had in some way seen it

29 The Realization of the Infinite

30 ...never needing to feed off the dead

31 Before dying, the old woman said that she had been dreaming

32 ...the smell of just-cooked rice

33 Every Winged Thing Passes Unmolested Through Infinity

34 ...stitched and torn, cut and spliced

35 An Introduction to Invertebrate Zoology

36 ...of which her tiny organism, so insubstantial, will never know

37 Notebook for the Amateur Naturalist

38 ...should it be found and turned in

39 On the Care & Repair of Books

40 ...living their same previous private unread anthologized shelf-ridden lives

41 Payne's Grey

42 ...evidence of a suspicious nature

43 Essay on Trees

44 ...the signpost that spells out what never was

45 I want to say that it happened sometime

46 ...is not clearly understood

47 Among the many various differences, I truly believed

48 ...being transcribed and prepared for publication by Karena

49 February Fooled the Forsythia

50 ...the heaving of breaking apart

51 Strange Mechanism for a Dream

52 ...all in a confusion of lateday ringings

53 On the Reading of

54 ...Epilogue:...I too will slice open the belly of a great heaving.

Notes:

"Essays"--Cover.

ISBN:

9781932511550

1932511555

OCLC:

86115281