Two very intriguing new titles from Reality Street: Ken Edwards’s Down with Beauty, and tapestry by Philip Terry.
Here’s the publisher’s blurb for Down with Beauty:
DOWN WITH BEAUTY explores, in a series of linked dialogues, dramatic monologues and short fictions, the themes of exile, the aftermath of war, paranoia, improvised music and nothingness. The collection is completed with the full text of NOSTALGIA FOR UNKNOWN CITIES, previously published separately. Some samples here, here and here – others will be revealed.
A very strange, scattered book—lovely.
Here’s Reality Street’s blurb for tapestry:
Taking as its starting point marginal images in the Bayeux Tapestry, which have been left largely unexplained by historians, Terry retells the story of the Norman Conquest from the point of view of the tapestry’s English embroiderers. Combining magic realism and Oulipian techniques, this is a tour de force of narrative and language.
tapestry also got a great review from The Guardian’s Nicholas Lezard:
By showing a language in flux,tapestry draws you into its world: that of the creation of the Bayeux tapestry (which, as we are reminded in the book by an exasperated narrator, isn’t a tapestry at all, but a work of embroidery) by a group of nuns in the late 11th century at a priory in Kent. …
Medieval works lend themselves to the picaresque, or multiple narration – think of The Decameròn or The Canterbury Tales. So while there is an overarching narrative, that of the commission and creation of the tapestry, work is paused while each nun tells a story related to her work. If you look at the tapestry, you will remember, or notice, that there are numerous extraneous designs along the borders that would appear to have nothing to do with the matter of the Norman usurpation. Terry has noticed, as have others, the Aesopian motifs that occur, and includes slender, playful versions, sometimes modernised, of Aesop’s fables himself. My favourite is one in which a lion, confronting Aesop, asks him to tell him a fable before the lion eats him. So Aesop says he was confronted by a lion who asked him to tell a fable … and so on; and eventually the lion gets bored and goes away.
Great to see some new stuff that’s, well, really new.
Biblioklept 
