Bird-Self Accumulated

by Don Judson

Overview

"When BooBoo stabs Morris Boyle I am reading a news magazine that someone has smuggled into the wing."
Thus, the protagonist of this novella introduces us to prison, one of the several worlds he inhabits, worlds most of us would rather ignore but which inexorably, through what we see and hear and read and live on uncountable American streets, has become the one world we can no longer avoid. It seduces us with the voice of drugs and violence. Of the disenfranchised. Of those both at once outside and standing within the center of what no longer holds. It informs us of who we are today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814743980
Publisher:	New York University Press
Publication date:	03/01/1996
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	191
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

After spending four and a half years in a Forida prison, Don Judson attended Brown University. Since graduating, he has published fiction in journals such as Central Park and New Letters. Bird-Self Accumulated is a winner of the Mamdouha S. Bobst Literary Award. This is his first book.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Brilliant, articulate, street-wise. . . Donald Judson's writings are not to be missed. He understands the difference between lyricism for its own sake and literary dynamics and can make them dance through and around his characters in the highest literary forms."

-Meredith Steinbach,

"Donald Judson is someone who has big writing talent. His work is action-packed, it's about small-town hoods, it reeks of violence—but the whole is rendered in an exquisite, lyrical prose."

-Edmund White

Editorial Reviews

The protagonist of this ambitious first novel, a petty criminal and junkie tersely identified merely as Holgate, leads a fractured, fragmented life, wobbling from small-time robberies to prison to dingy apartments and drug dealing. Judson shuns traditional story line and tells Holgate's story in a whirlwind series of first- and third-person snapshots. The short tale opens with the narrator adrift, driving a borrowed car while high on pills. Then there's a botched robbery; a stint in jail; a drug deal gone bad; a constantly shifting backdrop of accomplices and girlfriends and ubiquitous violence. What does it add up to? An opaque vision, delivered with admirable intensity, especially in the first-person sections that occupy most of the book and, at their best, may remind readers of Denis Johnson's more intoxicating verbal benders. The shift to third-person narration in the book's second part, however, generates less energy, devolving into a static cycle of violence and disillusionment. What begins as a provocative tale thus dissipates, lacking an ending that can bring the entire landscape into focus. (May) FYI: Bird-Self Accumulated won the Mamdouha S. Bobst Literary Award (formerly known as the Elmer Holmes Bobst Award), granted to emerging writers.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

"Brilliant, articulate, street-wise. . . Donald Judson's writings are not to be missed. He understands the difference between lyricism for its own sake and literary dynamics and can make them dance through and around his characters in the highest literary forms."

Meredith Steinbach

"Donald Judson is someone who has big writing talent. His work is action-packed, it's about small-town hoods, it reeks of violence—but the whole is rendered in an exquisite, lyrical prose."

Edmund White

"Brilliant, articulate, street-wise. . . Donald Judson's writings are not to be missed. He understands the difference between lyricism for its own sake and literary dynamics and can make them dance through and around his characters in the highest literary forms."

-Meredith Steinbach

"Donald Judson is someone who has big writing talent. His work is action-packed, it's about small-town hoods, it reeks of violence—but the whole is rendered in an exquisite, lyrical prose."

-Edmund White

From the Publisher