Keene’s masterful prose smoothly transgresses traditional lines of representation and description
—Publishers Weekly
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Annotations

Fiction by John Keene

An experimental first novel of poem-like compression, Annotations has a great deal to say about growing up Black in St. Louis. Reminiscent of Jean Toomer’s Cane, the book is in part a meditation on African-American autobiography. Keene explores questions of identity from many angles––from race to social class to sexuality (gay and straight). Employing all manner of textual play and rhythmic and rhetorical maneuvers, he (re)creates his life story as a jazz fugue-in-words.

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Paperback (published October 1, 1995)

ISBN
9780811213042
Price US
12.95
Price CN
17.5
Trim Size
5x8
Page Count
96

John Keene

American writer and translator

Keene’s masterful prose smoothly transgresses traditional lines of representation and description
—Publishers Weekly
Genius—brilliant, polished and of considerable depth.
—Ishmael Reed
Annotations moves jaggedly, lightninglike, with speed and with wrought metonymic aplomb. It conduces to quick reaches of insight and accretion, unexpected lyric heft, quick elliptic dilation. In this book which achieves moment and range well beyond what its relative brevity leads one to expect, John Keene makes an auspicious debut.
—Nathaniel Mackey
The work of a gifted writer who seeks to immerse himself in the body of language so that certain ruling assumptions may open themselves up to an inner dialectical scanning.
—Wilson Harris
When I first read John Keene’s fiction, almost a decade ago at Harvard, I knew immediately that I was in the presence of genius. With his work Annotations, Mr. Keene, after years of woodshedding and apprenticeships, has fulfilled that early promise. These poetic meditations about private lives and public events are brilliant, polished and of considerable depth.
—Ishmael Reed