Author/Uploaded by Laird Hunt
Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Contents Tiger [Tiger] Tiger UN Story Giraffe Story Half Moon (a provisional fiction) Climb the Whale This Wide Terraqueous World God Bless Johnny Cash Still Life with Snow and Hammer Notes Funder Acknowledgments The Publisher’s Circle of Coffee House Press About th...
Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Contents Tiger [Tiger] Tiger UN Story Giraffe Story Half Moon (a provisional fiction) Climb the Whale This Wide Terraqueous World God Bless Johnny Cash Still Life with Snow and Hammer Notes Funder Acknowledgments The Publisher’s Circle of Coffee House Press About the Author Back Cover Guide Cover Title Page Copyright Contents Tiger [Tiger] Tiger Acknowledgments Start to Contents Pagebreaks of the Print Version Cover Page i ii iv v vi vii ix 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 125 127 128 129 131 132 Praise for This Wide Terraqueous World “The pilgrim moves through his days and sees far. Often a genial and informative guide, always in the midst of departure, he inhabits two worlds—possessing a self who resides in dazzling light, and another shadow self, drawn to the subterranean, who lives by his side. Hunt has written a mesmerizing, entrancing chronicle of the one who exists above the ground, and the one who is inexorably drawn to the world far below, where the Radium Girls still burn, where Ella Cruse lays crackling, where in Sicily’s catacombs, riotous, celebratory, the dead in crepe and velvet beckon. In the midst of life and thinking and storytelling, ‘thinking and dreaming gone to ruin.’ A mysterious, often thrilling collection, beautifully done.” —Carole Maso “Laird Hunt’s This Wide Terraqueous World is a luminous gem of a book. Brimming with unexpected insights at every turn—whether visiting W. G. Sebald’s grave or Willa Cather’s Red Cloud or observing donkeys at a distance in China, Corsica, California—here is an account of a writer’s life in which verifiable truths and an unfettered imagination work together brilliantly. Acting as a kind of post-postmodern Virgil, Hunt takes us on a journey in which travelogue melds with philosophy, literary acumen informs cultural observation, and far-ranging memories are set free by an unusually prodigious curiosity about every large and little thing. A kaleidoscope of genre-defying essays that leaves the reader frankly awestruck, This Wide Terraqueous World is a book to celebrate and treasure.” —Bradford Morrow “Heads or Tails? An ancient game of chance. And what of the middle, the space between the head and tail? If it is, it is in the flip; it is in the moment of the coin glinting in its unfixed oscillation amidst this radiant uncertainty. It is here that I locate Laird Hunt’s visionary prose. Between the uncanny crisp edge of the detail and the blurred seam where a scene once collected, between remembering and forgetting, between the self and the act of writing, between the painted tiles that decorated the childhood nursery and those that now punctuate the scene of language’s attempts, there is something, but Praise for ALSO BY LAIRD HUNT