Morpheus

Fiction. MORPHEUS has its origins in a novel John Kinsella worked on in his late teens--a time of transition between adolescence and adulthood, but not a time before he had at least glimpsed the contours of the vast, interconnecting literary project that was to be his lifelong pursuit. An amalgam of realism and fantasy, of fiction, poetry, and drama, the project limned the phantasmagoric yet self-questioning and disciplined emotional terrain that has so captivated and intrigued his many current readers worldwide. But the young Kinsella never adequately 'completed' MORPHEUS. This may be no accident, as MORPHEUS is so protean, so heterogeneous, and so capacious that, conceptually, it may defy completion. Kinsella thus shelved the project as he began to develop his characteristic adult idiom, which has articulated itself largely though not exclusively in lyric poetry.--Nicholas Birns

John Kinsella' MORPHEUS is everything you've ever wanted in a work of literature / and also nothing at all / in precisely the same isomorphic location / MORPHEUS is the precocious explosion of delightful incision from a teenager revisited by the ghost of his future / and also the failure of this incision to cut anything but itself for / this isn't a novel / in the way Naked Lunch is not a novel / but a suspended solution / and MORPHEUS is not juvenilia / and / this is not even a blurb / and you are not reading these words / and / you can read MORPHEUS / if you like / or / let it read you your future / or / leave / it / unread / it / stands / remixed / and / open / remixed / and / endless.--Davis Schneiderman

A lyrical tour de force. Literate, impassioned and often downright gorgeous, the prose sings with wit and vigor. Add a little Dr. Benway to Stephen Dedalus, with a touch of Gexnet's Divine, and you have a glimpse of Kinsella's Thomas Icarus Napoleon, the hero of this literary drama. Awesome.--Jeffrey Deshell