Drama. Poetry. From three-time Obie Award-winner Mac Wellman comes this complex and provocative play about two simple events. Yamaha Nazimova drops a glove. Jewel Beckett picks it up. Between these two occurrences, a band of moths, fingers, demons, and all-too-human pronouns sing 27 choruses rich with puns, reversals, exclamations, whisperings, cries of loss, cries of victory, arguments, and resolutions. Turning dramatic convention on its head, LEFT GLOVE offers a profound view of a mishap and its ramifications in the public and private sphere. "Chorus of One Resolved, that: LEFT GLOVE will fit thee like a glove if thou relishest the sort of play in which the most awe-inspiring acrobatic feats are performed by no other character than language. A left glove may have been lost, but here thou shall encounter dexterous play bountifully. And that is that. YEA"—Mónica de la Torre. Front cover art and design by Jonathon Rosen.

Left Glove (Solid Objects)

Literature & Fiction

Wellman, Mac

Dramas & Plays

Solid Objects

Fiction. For years, Lucy has visited her sister Miriam each summer, but now? No more. The invitation has been retracted. Maybe because of Lucy's strange conversational word games? Or maybe the accidents that happen every time she visits? Randy Bradley, Miriam's former companion, could solve the problem—but unfortunately, he's been replaced. With this letter of vulnerability and protest, we enter the deranged and yet funnily human thought processes of a well-meaning plague of a houseguest, sympathetic but agitated, scholarly but naive, a misfunctioning buoy in a dark sea of repressed familial discomfort. "This taut and terrifying epistolary novella of toxicity between sisters is a triumph of thrillingly crazed elegance. Jake Bohstedt Morrill is a remarkable new writer."—Gary Lutz "A cheerfully demented monologue on the subject of that which cannot be said, but which I'll say here anyway: RANDY BRADLEY. Jake Bohstedt Morrill is a terrifically gifted writer."—Ben Marcus

Randy Bradley (Solid Objects)

Bohstedt Morrill, Jake

Contemporary

Fiction. "As in Nosferatu, with its smartly imagined life of the German film director F. W. Murnau, here Shepard considers the Japanese special effects director Eiji Tsuburaya and his cinematic inventions for the science-fiction movie we know as Godzilla. And like many of Shepard's stories, MASTER OF MINIATURES limns the intense and alienated world of a focused expert obsessed with his field of endeavor, at a cost to his marriage and children. For Japanese survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the fifties, America itself seemed king of the monsters, to be looked at with fear and awe. This is a poignant and important story that seems to me a summation and condensation of many themes that have preoccupied Shepard before. Like a diamond held aloft, each turn of this tale in his deft hand flashes still more light"—Ron Hansen.

Master of Miniatures (Solid Objects)

SHEPARD, Jim

Fiction. "In lucid, utterly captivating prose, Miranda Mellis delivers a highly disciplined, deeply melancholy portrait of the living and the dead. I read it transfixed. It is a radiant piece of work."—Carole Maso "THE SPOKES is as elegant as it is daring, as arresting as it is mysterious. It seems to me a truly timeless story, which is to say not only that it removes itself from time—though it does—but that its pleasures, enigmas, and meanings ought to be as accessible fifty or a hundred years from now as they are today."—Kevin Brockmeier

The Spokes (Solid Objects)

Mellis, Miranda

Poetry. "In these lean, expansive, wonderful poems, language is a long nervous filament feeling along thought—Beckett or Woolf gone maximally internal and grand. A narrative of interiority, already multiple, already doubled against itself, now and now casting forth, seeking a firm connection to the outside, swept back tidally, resisting. A trenchant diagnosis of an un-ease constitutional and productive and common to all of us."—Catherine Wagner

So I Began (Solid Objects)

Lubasch, Lisa

Poetry

Poetry. "This book is continuing a tradition of Neo-Spiritualist literature in America where the poem is the means of divination. The poem is a map of a world where ghosts and unattributed thinkers and writers haunt and intrude and give signals to the world next to us. This is an occupation for all poets, the most secular to the most conceptual and the most experiential and spontaneous. If words appear in prose here in these pages, they are still the production of a New Spiritualist poet who feels the presences and wants to tell us about them."—Fanny Howe "Elizabeth Robinson's ON GHOSTS returns us to the haunted aura around words. Here, a crossing of genres—poetry, prose meditation, personal testimony—shows that language itself amounts to a gathering of ghosts. Robinson's oblique lyricism beckons us toward a twilight zone where we become 'witness to the unverifiable.' This is writing as the highest form of bewitching."—Andrew Joron

On Ghosts (Solid Objects)

Robinson, Elizabeth

Poetry. Artwork by Emilie Clark. "Lisa Jarnot writes the meter of everything in A PRINCESS MAGIC PRESTO SPELL. As she does this, she reminds us what matters. In case you don't know, it is the small animals and the plum trees and the mothers of friends and the moon and her dreams. This book is funny and yet also is an elegy. I read it. And then I read it several more times because I didn't want it to end. It is that lovely."—Juliana Spahr

A Princess Magic Presto Spell (Solid Objects)

Jarnot, Lisa

History & Criticism

Poetry. "From the internet, I learn that 'complicated grief' designates a bereavement disorder in which, instead of fading with time, the pain of loss remains as acute as it was in the beginning. But from Laura Mullen's book I learn that complicated grief also names something else: not a sufferer's excruciating condition, but a writer's exhilarating achievement. Here, the incapacity to move on from 'old' psychic scenarios has been itself complicated by a formidable prose that not only refuses to get over them but even works to revive them in all their undying (Mullen would say: undead) vigor. To these unstintingly reimagined ancient histories—ranging from fairy tale and yesteryear's news item to childhood trauma and grownup broken heart—Mullen gives all the hyperrealist precision of a dream: every turn and phrase starts at you. And not the least of this book's disconcerting, but strangely salutary, powers is that, under its stimulus, you can't help starting back."—D.A. Miller In a way (the way I'm taking it) Laura Mullen's COMPLICATED GRIEF follows (with giant dropouts) everything she knows about being a monster. Her aegis covers women (young ones and aging), un-natural disasters and literature. If something packed could wander like Julianne Moore's mind, to the benefit of everyone, but more like a whole department store or a library feeling snarky, shuffled itself and somehow it was wise.—Eileen Myles One of the deep pleasures of this book is to be in the presence of a mind fully alive to the contradictions of what it is to be a sentient being, thinking and feeling while simultaneously thinking of feeling. I found myself marveling word-by-word, page after page. One thought: How often are we offered the opportunity to watch a mind form the mental construct we call "a thought," and why is it so rare? The world is here, seeping brilliantly through the seams, made utterly new.—Nick Flynn

Complicated Grief (Solid Objects)

Mullen, Laura

Poetry. "'It's still dark / Then, a door,' begins Julie Carr's beautiful THINK TANK. We are invited to step through it, into a space both interstitial and marked, always, with the parts that don't adhere: 'streaks of water between panes of glass,' 'shores... [like] garnets, as vital as they are coarse,' a '[p]inching and elliptical grammar... slightly tipped at the horizon.' This is where pleasure lies—in its tilted reality and luminous curiosity that resembles, so much, childhood imaginaries of loss, landscape and becoming. In connecting to these other qualities of consciousness, Carr opens apertures and seams of different kinds, in a complex, delicate, durational writing that could be both things: the mouth that releases its load of blood when it opens to speak, or something else—a way to get to the next part of life. 'At the doorway: endlessness,' Carr writes. And we follow her gaze until it breaks: 'glinting and wet.'"—Bhanu Kapil

Think Tank (Solid Objects)

Carr, Julie

Think Tank

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Books by Solid Objects