Brooklyn Is: Southeast Of The Island: Travel Notes

Brooklyn Is: Southeast of the Island: Travel Notes

From Booklist*Starred Review* Agee (1909-55) is now considered a classic American writer, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning and posthumous novel A Death in the Family (1957), of a brilliant and seminal body of movie criticism that shaped how that genre is perceived and practiced, and coauthor, with Walker Evans, of the photo-and-text Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), a heart-touching account of Depression-era farmers. Now, with this little book about Brooklyn, he can also be counted a travel writer. It remained unpublished during his lifetime (though written in 1939), saw its first appearance in print in 1968 (in Esquire), and finally has been given separate publication as a book. Introduced by Jonathan Lethem, author of the riveting and place-defining novel Motherless Brooklyn (1999), Agee's prose poem captures the textural variety of Brooklyn in language that bears reading aloud for its lilt, melody, and pleasingly pungent vocabulary: "The collaborated creature of the insanely fungoid growth of fifteen or twenty villages, now sewn and quilted edge to edge, and lacking any center in remote proportion of its mass, [Brooklyn] is perhaps the most amorphous of all modern cities." Brad HooperCopyright