The Mayberry Chronicles by Ed Sawyer
$14.99
I never got to know them well enough. I met them, years ago now, when they were little more than moving shadows. Afterwards I lived with them, or they with me, for months at a time, and I never did understand them as well as I would have liked. Friendly but not familiar, the natives of Mayberry show you what they intend to show you; then they leave or turn away and you’re left standing there, hand or arms outstretched, with nothing in your grasp but dead air. I wanted more. I wanted intimacy, the kind that exists only among people who can read one another’s minds. I dreamed about looking inside them, fleshing out the shadows. Finally they let me.
–Ed Sawyer, “The Stranger in Town”
A Cuban American poet and critic, [Pérez Firmat] is the sharpest of a growing school of Hispanic thinkers.
–Newsweek
While doing research for his book on The Andy Griffith Show, A Cuban in Mayberry, Gustavo Pérez Firmat came across “The Mayberry Chronicles,” poems apparently written by Ed Sawyer, the New Yorker who moves to Mayberry after hearing about the friendliness of the townspeople. Pérez Firmat has published several collections of poetry, including Bilingual Blues, Sin lengua deslenguado and Viejo Verde. His other books include Life on the Hyphen and The Havana Habit. He teaches at Columbia University, where he is the David Feinson Professor in the Humanities.
Description
The Mayberry Chronicles
by Ed Sawyer
$14.99, paper
978-1-64662-507-9
2021
A writer and scholar, Cuban-born Gustavo Pérez Firmat is the author of many books of cultural and literary criticism, among them Life on the Hyphen, a study of Cuban American culture that was awarded the Eugene M. Kayden University Press National Book Award, and the memoir Next Year in Cuba, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. His poems and stories have appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse, Growing Up in the South, The Prentice Hall Anthology of Latino Literature, and The Vintage Book of Contemporary Cuban Literature. His most recent books are the poetry collections Sin Lengua, deslenguado and Viejo Verde. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has been the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Newsweek included him among “100 Americans to watch for the 21st century” and Hispanic Business Magazine selected him as one of the “100 most influential Hispanics” in the United States. He teaches Spanish American literature at Columbia University, where he is the David Feinson Professor in the Humanities.
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.