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Please join us for an evening with Robert Kelly, in celebration of his new book, The Logic of the World and Other Fictions.

Four previous volumes of Robert Kelly's manifestly original fictions
have been hailed as "exhilarating…full of signs and wonders" in the New York Times Book Review, "sparking, multiform, yet indivisible" in American Book Review, and "tantalizing, unsettling" in the Review of Contemporary Fiction.
Choice rightly points to his "affinities with the writings of Borges,
Nabokov, Calvino, and Coover." The thirty works in this fifth
collection of short fictions—the first to appear in sixteen
years—knowingly trespass into fictional realms of droll lyricism,
audacious description, studied anachronism, sensual immediacy and
subtle compassion. In one, a woman waits at a window for the moon to
return her body; another reveals the triple identity of Don Juan; in
still another, an itinerant tragedian invents a dangerous form of
theatrical performance; in the title story a dragon questions a
youthful knight's errancy, as well as his sanity. Scattered throughout
are nine pieces known as "sudden fiction," a genre Kelly named, while
other tales appear in the guises of myths, letters, rituals, and quite
frequently dreams. "That is the single mystery of sleep," one narrator
reminds, "to teach us to wake up." The author's agile imagination mines
from the thick substance of language the numinous qualities buried
within it. His fictions defy the conventionally plotted short story,
and seem to conjure narrative from an infinitely recombinant DNA of the
psyche. After reading The Logic of the World, the reader risks
awakening to discover a hitherto unexplored territory of the mind.

Robert Kelly was born in Brooklyn on September 24, 1935. He attended
CUNY and Columbia University, and since 1961 has taught at Bard
College. Robert Kelly has authored more than 60 published volumes of
fiction, poetry and prose-poems. His 1967 novel The Scorpions first brought him a cult readership. In 1980, his book Kill The Messenger won the Los Angeles Times Book Award; and in 1985, A Transparent Tree
received the prestigious Academy-Institute Award from the American
Institute of Arts and Letters. He has been poet-in-residence at Tufts
University and at the California Institute of Technology. His fiction
has been translated variously into Italian, German, and French.