Adam Engel has been writing for many years. In 2010, he published his fervid collection of essays from the early years of the Bush/Cheney "administration," I HOPE MY CORPSE GIVES YOU THE PLAGUE: MY LIFE IN THE BUSH ERA OF GHOSTS. The year before that, he published his linguistically stripped and poetically dystopian novel TOPIARY, a book distilled from ten thousand pages that had been written over the span of more than a decade. Not even a calendar-year after CORPSE, Engel now brings us another book, another kind of book, CELLA FANTASTIK: A BOOK OF PROEMS.  

Flip it open to any page and you will find treasure of one unexpected kind or another. What's there will always ring true, always be compelling, always conscious of the literary tradition it comes from-and different from it.

In discussing the "proem," says Engel, "1500 page tree-killers like David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest [must] be dense-packed into one-to-twenty pages of 'highly concentrated' prosody. Not into 'synopses' like Cliff's Notes, but impressionistic portraits in the 'colors' of sound and vision, like Gertrude Stein's Matisse and Picasso. Printed words have been studied as 'object-oriented technology' for several hundred years, [and] every word carries within it a history of its own use and meanings in the form of etymology."

Keeping in mind this degree of awareness of the crushing strictures of our own time, of the nature of what literary expression has achieved in the past, and of the emptiness of much of what it is "achieving" in the present, venture into CELLA FANTASTIK.

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ABOUT ADAM ENGEL 

From the author of A NATION GONE BLIND: AMERICA IN AN AGE OF SIMPLIFICATION AND DECEIT (2006), seventeen literary-political essays ask whether Americans can remain a nation of liars ("U.S.A.-Land of Liars") without inevitably bringing about the eternal death of the republic. "The 'Debate' Over 9/11" asks this question, as does "The Premeditated Murder of the United States of America." Readers will find the question asked--and answered--in "Howard Zinn and the Tea Cozy," "Is Dwight Garner a Dissembler, Deceiver, and Malefactor to His Nation?", and in "Our Enemies the Left Gatekeepers" parts 1, 2, and 3. They'll find it asked yet again, and answered, in pieces like "Amy Goodman: A Mind Prostituted," "The Pernicious Hypocrisy of Frank Rich of the New York Times" parts 1 and 2, "Poisoned Nation, Poisoned Truth," and in the ambitious final piece as it zeroes in on lies and emptiness in writers like Frank Rich, Dwight Garner, Rebecca Solnit, Don Delillo, and Thomas L. Friedman and asks "Can the Literary Life Exist in a Post-1984 Nation?"

In an "Appendix," Larsen lists 19 books as guides to what really happened on 9/11 and to an understanding of why continuing to hide from the truth in denial and lies will destroy the nation with certainty and forever. Of the nineteen, the one far and away most obviously important is the extraordinary achievement in scientific forensics by Dr. Judy Wood, the newly published Where Did the Towers Go? In a Foreword to Dr. Wood's volume, Larsen writes that "The book you now hold in your hands is the most important book of the twenty-first century. . . . Where Did the Towers Go? is a work, assuming that its content and message are properly and fairly heeded, that offers a starting point from which those who genuinely want to do it can begin, first, to rein in and then, perhaps, even end the wanton criminality and destructiveness of a set of American policies that took as their justification and starting point the horrific events of September 11, 2001." Where Did the Towers Go? offers an escape from the prison of blindness and death described, chronicled, and lamented in The Skull of Yorick.

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