The Ghosts of Birds

by Eliot Weinberger

Overview

A new collection from “one of the world’s great essayists” (The New York Times)

The Ghosts of Birds offers thirty-five essays by Eliot Weinberger: the first section of the book continues his linked serial-essay, An Elemental Thing, which pulls the reader into “a vortex for the entire universe” (Boston Review). Here, Weinberger chronicles a nineteenth-century journey down the Colorado River, records the dreams of people named Chang, and shares other factually verifiable discoveries that seem too fabulous to possibly be true. The second section collects Weinberger’s essays on a wide range of subjects—some of which have been published in Harper’s, New York Review of Books, and London Review of Books—including his notorious review of George W. Bush’s memoir Decision Points and writings about Mongolian art and poetry, different versions of the Buddha, American Indophilia (“There is a line, however jagged, from pseudo-Hinduism to Malcolm X”), Béla Balázs, Herbert Read, and Charles Reznikoff. This collection proves once again that Weinberger is “one of the bravest and sharpest minds in the United States” (Javier Marías).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811226189
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	10/11/2016
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	485,041
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Eliot Weinberger’s books of literary essays include Karmic Traces, An Elemental Thing, The Ghosts of Birds, and Angels & Saints. His political writings are collected in What I Heard About Iraq and What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles. The author of a study of Chinese poetry translation, 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, he is a translator of the poetry of Bei Dao and the editor of The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry. He was formerly the general editor of the series Calligrams: Writings from and on China and the literary editor of the Murty Classical Library of India. Among his many translations of Latin American poetry and prose are The Poems of Octavio Paz, Paz’s In Light of India, Vicente Huidobro’s Altazor, Xavier Villaurrutia’s Nostalgia for Death, and Jorge Luis Borges’ Seven Nights and Selected Non-Fictions. He has been publishing with New Directions since 1975.

Editorial Reviews

Combining scholarly authority with a moral allegiance to the arcane…Weinberger creates genre-bending essays and prose poems to help us see the world anew. This eclectic collection spans centuries and cultures and might make you wonder if there is anything its author doesn't know…Weinberger often marshals fantastical-yet-real facts, in texts as brief and deadpan as anything by Lydia Davis.

The New York Times Book Review - Daphne Kalotay

07/25/2016
This slim volume from Weinberger (The Walls, the City, and the World), a prodigious translator, editor, and author, provides abundant rewards for readers in essays that are short, dense, and rich with meanings and ideas. The selections display an aesthetic of distilled prose and a fascination with poking at the seams between reportage, fiction, and poetry. The book is separated into halves, the first of which is a sort of addendum to Weinberger’s haunting, meditative 2007 An Elemental Thing. In these new pieces, Weinberger discusses history, nature, and mythology—among other things—and interrogates the traditional form and function of the essay. He opens with a chapter dissecting the story of Adam and Eve, and from there casts a wide net over topics including dreams, American mythologies, and a cultural taxonomy of stones. The second section of the book contains more traditional essays, some looking at particular works, and several in the more experimental vein of the first half. Of particular note are his essay on indigenous Mexican poetry and his notorious 2010 review of George W. Bush’s memoir Decision Points, entitled “Bush the Postmodernist.” The latter is a withering piece of prose that manages to be simultaneously hilarious and horrifying, as acute a look at the 21st-century American condition as any produced to date. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"My favorite essayist is Eliot Weinberger. His remarkable breadth of calm concern is impressive."

The New York Times Book Review - Gary Snyder

"One remains in silent amazement: How does he find these stories? How does he know everything?"

Die Zeit

"Our personal favorite for the Nobel Prize."

Rolling Stone (Germany)

"Combining scholarly authority with a moral allegiance to the arcane, the translator and editor Weinberger creates genre-bending essays and prose poems to help us see the world anew. This eclectic collection spans centuries and cultures and might make you wonder if there is anything its author doesn’t know."

The New York Times - Daphne Kalotay

"His essays use lists, collages of information, and sometimes, as poetry does, varying line breaks. They don’t read like anyone else’s work."

The New Yorker - Christopher Byrd

"Eliot Weinberger — in his original essays no less than in his work as a translator, editor, and critic — is a masterful curator. He is a restorer, an arranger, a presenter"

Barnes and Noble.com

"In The Ghost of Birds, part of which is a continuation of the serial essay begun in An Elemental Thing, Eliot Weinberger further establishes himself as one of our singular and singularly great essayists. A modernist with the horror and absurdity of the 20th century behind him, Weinberger’s collection—which moves from medieval Irish legends to contemporary politics and poetry—is tinged humor and grace, fully alive to the weirdness of the world."

Lit Hub - Stephen Spark

"The brilliant net of details that Weinberger casts and recasts in his various inventive approaches to form is precisely what constitutes a superlative poetic imagination. And it’s what holds the essays—and us—trembling and raging and hallucinating together."

Forrest Gander

"Over time, Weinberger has become known for his unclassifiable prose, a mode in the twilight between prose poetry, amateur philological essay, and literary criticism."

David S. Wallace

"A new book of essays proves to be as erudite, compelling, and delightfully strange as we have come to expect from Eliot Weinberger."

Booklist - Brendan Driscoll

"A master of the infinite commentary on the astonishing variety of the world … I envy those who have not yet discovered him."

Enrique Vila-Matas

"As is often the case with brilliant writers, an Eliot Weinberger sentence cannot be mistaken for that of anyone else."

Australian Book Review - Will Heyward

"Eliot Weinberger — in his original essays no less than in his work as a translator, editor, and critic — is a masterful curator. He is a restorer, an arranger, a presenter"

Barnes and Noble.com - Justin Taylor

2016-08-03
The accomplished essayist, editor, and translator marries a thirst for other worlds with a questing intellect in this challenging menagerie of writings, some previously published.Weinberger (The Wall, the City, and the World, 2014, etc.) opens with a sufficiently engaging revision of the Adam and Eve story and attendant superstitions but then launches into a rather cryptic continuation of his serial essay An Elemental Thing, which, despite its often elegant poetics, may confound anyone who has not read the earlier installments. It may puzzle even if one has, given the section's preference for the esoteric, the ethereal, and the enigmatic. However, the author saves it with brief but arresting curiosities from a selection of world subcultures. A writer of impressive, sometimes-daunting erudition, Weinberger offsets this first section's forays into the obscure with measured, eye-opening considerations of subjects ranging from incarnations of the Buddha and the I Ching to the literature of the city and Mongol history, including a devastating critique of an exhibit at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. East Indian and Mexican poetry likewise get their due. These exhaustively researched pieces are richly detailed and unfailingly interesting. Contrastingly unrestrained yet telling is his scorched-earth review of George W. Bush's Decision Points. As an aesthete and literary “archaeologist,” Weinberger also exhumes and recovers—or at least re-examines—the artistic reputations of a number of half-forgotten poets, authors, and intellectuals who were lions in their days. This is done with admirable sobriety and finesse and without a trace of hagiography, though for some, it may tend to bog down in minutiae and oddity. Weinberger says of the I Ching, “its fragments and aphorisms are meant to be dipped into at random.” One might say the same of this book, which dazzles as a repository of knowledge and interpretation but otherwise may be an acquired taste.

Kirkus Review