Introvert? Nothing to read 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.

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