Eileen Myles’ anthology PATHETIC LITERATURE published this week to critical acclaim. David L. Ulin wrote a stunning review of the book for The Los Angeles Times, raving: “PATHETIC LITERATURE is an anthology rich in allusions: One piece speaks to another across geography and time. Moving fluidly from Jorge Luis Borges, Chester Himes and Victor Hugo to contemporary figures such as Michelle Tea, Justin Torres and Layli Long Soldier (whose poem ‘38’ is a vivid tour de force), the book is arranged alphabetically by first name, as if to turn our preconceptions inside out…The weave is so all-encompassing, the associations so multilayered, that I feel like fireworks are popping off inside my head. I want to think about these lines of communication: Kafka to Weil to Chantal Akerman, all writing on parents; Maggie Nelson also quoting Shōnagon: ‘Whatever people may think of my book, … I still regret that it ever came to light.’ I want to think about all this pathos, this emotion taking place between the lines and across the centuries. I want to think about these writers in conversation not only with one another but also within the imagination of the editor. More than anything, of course, the echoes belong to Myles, which is what gives PATHETIC LITERATURE a sensibility that is authorial as much as curatorial…PATHETIC LITERATURE represents not so much a collection as it does an ethos: ‘almost a poem,’ its creator observes. These texts and voices take us someplace unexpected, beyond the individual and into the realm of a collective, a tapestry of words that add up to a way of being in the world.” Meanwhile, Oprah Daily featured the anthology on its 2022 Holiday Gift Guide. The citation reads: “For the quirky and the weird—and who among us is not?—this singularly unexpected assemblage curated by Lambda Award–winning poet and writer Eileen Myles is an anthology like no other. This melange of work from writers of widely varying genres and forms—from Jorge Luis Borges to Rumi to Djuna Barnes—is ‘pathetic’ in the sense of being linked to pathos. In her introduction to the volume, Myles writes: ‘Each of these writers has a discomfort or a restlessness’ and has produced work that ‘acknowledges a boundary and then passes it.’ What Myles has captured here is simply this: the power of literature.” Grove Press published the anthology on November 15, 2022