Book of the Day: A Wild Party for New Year's

March,  Joseph Moncure, The Wild Party (Pantheon, 1st ed., 1st printing, 1994). ISBN 0-679-42450-4. Woodcut illustrations by Art Spiegelman, author/illustrator of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus. Elegant reissue of the Jazz Age classic, first published in 1928. Spiegelman’s woodcuts are of the period.

When this edition came out in 1994, The New Yorker wrote:

March's "The Wild Party"... is a hardboiled Jazz Age tragedy told in syncopating rhyming couplets. It has the mnemonic tenacity, if not the wholesomeness, of a nursery rhyme, and to read it once is to get large shards of it permanently lodged in the brain: "Queenie was a blonde and her age stood still,/And she danced twice a day in vaudeville." Queenie and Burrs, her man of the moment, have a violent spat. They patch it up by tossing a drunken party for their low-life pals, one of whom brings along Black, an innocent young uptown swell. Black falls for Queenie, and they end up in the back room. ("Some love is fire: some love is rust:/But the fiercest, cleanest love is lust.") Burrs staggers in and a scuffle ensues. He pulls out a gun. Black wrests it from him. It fires, killing Burrs, and the poem hurtles at bullet speed into the wall of its abrupt last lines. The 26-year-old March improvised "The Wild Party," a few lines a day, over the summer of 1926, soon after quitting the New Yorker. The poem was considered too hot to publish until 1928, when a limited edition of 750 copies was released by Covici. March died in 1977, his two major works underappreciated, despite a cult following that includes William Burroughs, who credits "The Wild Party" with having made him want to become a writer. Perhaps it's March's perfectly pitched tone of bewildered innocence curdled into worldly cynicism that resonates so well in our nineties.

8.75” x 5.5”, hardcover, unclipped dust jacket. Very good condition. HBB price: $39.95.

Henry Bemis Books is one man’s attempt to bring more diversity and quality to a Charlotte-Mecklenburg market of devoted readers starved for choices. Our website is at www.henrybemisbookseller.blogspot.com.  Henry Bemis Books is also happy to entertain reasonable offers on items in inventory. Shipping is always free; local buyers are welcome to drop by and pick up their purchases at our location off Peachtree Road in Northwest Charlotte if they like. #RareBooks #HenryBemisBooks #March #TheWildParty #Spiegelman #LGBT #Charlotte