Joe Brainard: I Remember

by Joe Brainard, Ron Padgett

Overview

Joe Brainard's I Remember is a literary and artistic cult classic, praised and admired by writers from Paul Auster to John Ashery and Edmund White. As autobiography, Brainard's method was brilliantly simple: to set down specific memories as they rose to the surface of his consciousness, each prefaced by the refrain "I remember": "I remember when I thought that if you did anything bad, policemen would put you in jail." Brainard's enduring gem of a book has been issued in various forms over the past thirty years. In 1970, Angel Hair books published the first edition of I Remember, which quickly sold out; he wrote two subsequent volumes for Angel Hair, More I Remember (1972) and More I Remember More (1973), both of which proved as popular as the original. In 1973, the Museum of Modern Art in New York published Brainard's I Remember Christmas, a new text for which he also contributed a cover design and four drawings. Excerpts from the Angel Hair editions appeared in Interview, Gay Sunshine, The World and the New York Herald. Then in 1975, Full Court Press issued a revised version collecting all three of the Angel Hair volumes and added new material, using the original title I Remember. This complete edition is prefaced by poet and translator Ron Padgett.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781887123488
Publisher:	Granary Books, Incorporated
Publication date:	02/02/2001
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	4.40(w) x 6.80(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Joe Brainard grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma and moved to New York at the age of 20 in 1961. A writer and visual artist, he is associated with the New York School poets, many of whom collaborated with him. His early paintings and collages show the influences of Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and Joseph Cornell, but his work soon distinguished itself with its combination of lyricism, wit, and congeniality. He died in 1994. A retrospective of his work organized by the Berkeley Art Museum toured the United States in 2002.

Editorial Reviews

A small but real American classic.

The New York Times - Dwight Garner

Though the book never strains for psychological insight or a totalizing worldview, its mix of naive wonder and deathbed reflection feels like its own kind of wisdom.

Bookforum - Andrew Chan

Out of print for a decade, these memoirs of the artist and writer who died of AIDS last year include a new afterword by Ron Padgett. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly