Stories and Essays of Mina Loy

by Mina Loy, Sara Crangle (Editor)

Overview

Stories and Essays of Mina Loy is the first book-length volume of Mina Loy's narrative writings and critical work ever published. This volume brings together her short fiction, as well as hybrid works that include modernized fairy tales, a Socratic dialogue, and a ballet. Loy's narratives address issues such as abortion and poverty, and what she called "the sex war" is an abiding theme throughout. Stories and Essays of Mina Loy also contains dramatic works that parody the bravado and misogyny of Futurism and demonstrate Loy's early, effective use of absurdist technique. Essays and commentaries on aesthetics, historical events, and religion complete this beguiling collection, cementing Mina Loy's place as one of the great writers of the twentieth century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781564786548
Publisher:	Deep Vellum Publishing
Publication date:	08/30/2011
Series:	British Literature
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	280
Sales rank:	600,816
File size:	511 KB

About the Author

Mina Loy was born in London, England in 1882. A central figure in the history of modernism, her writing commanded the attention of Ezra Pound and Yvor Winters in the Little Review and the Dial respectively, era-defining journals that published Joyce’s Ulysses and Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” Aligning herself with Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism, Loy influenced pivotal figures such as Marcel Duchamp and Djuna Barnes.

Sara Crangle is a lecturer and director of the Centre for Modernist Studies at the University of Sussex, UK. Her books include Prosaic Desires: Modernist Knowledge, Boredom, Laughter, and Anticipation and On Bathos: Literature, Art, Music.

Editorial Reviews

While not intended as a definitive edition, this latest collection gathers unpublished stories, essays, drama, and commentary that reveal painter and poet Loy as a surveyor of fragmented, early 20th century urbanity. Best known for her collection Lunar Baedeker and regarded highly by the avant-garde, Loy is not "rediscovered" as a curious footnote to modernism, but as a practitioner of an appealing, eccentric minimalism. Loy embraces the fanciful as well as the realistic in work that resists categorization. She is as comfortable depicting a tamed, talking crocodile in a charming tale for all ages as she is with inhabiting occasionally cavalier adults; including Futurism and Love in a play; threading abstractions and overheard dialogue among details of daily life after World War I; or exploring criminality and its offspring in "The Three Wishes." Brief reflections on Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, art, sex, morality, and religion reveal a demanding intellect. Crangle's introduction is indispensable; Loy's linguistic flair and references require intense concentration and benefit from contextualization. Still, this editorial feat rewards the serious reader with an overview of an original voice. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

Marjorie Perloff writes: "Among the great modernist poets, Mina Loy was surely the greatest wit, the most sophisticated commentator on the vagaries of love, the one whose brittle and sardonic laughter continues... to pursue us."

Dalkey Archive Press

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