novel, volume 1 of FROM A BROKEN BOTTLE, TRACES...

Djbot Baghosthus' Run is the second volume of Mackey's ongoing epistolary fiction, From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate. Like the first volume, Bedouin Hornbook, this work is written by the composer/multi-instrumentalist N., a founding member of a jazz group known as the Mystic Horn Society. Djbot Baghosthus' Run is centered, in part, on the band's search for a new drummer. But this search, which begins with a revolution among the women of the group, and ends in a series of remarkable coincidences and eerie transcendental experiences, is also a search for everything that art (music and writing in this case) is and serves as an emblem for. Each letter spans an extraordinary range of voices and discourses, from philosophical to folkloric to erotic - with music always the connecting thread. Jazz for Mackey clearly is a cosmological and spiritual experience, on which signifies all those possibilities that lie beyond N.'s improvisations of a saxophone riff. At every level, intellectual, spiritual, sexual, and just plain gut, Djbot Baghosthus' Run is a masterwork of contemporary storytelling, a wonder that will haunt the emotions and arouse the intellect.

Atet A.D. is the third volume of Nathaniel Mackey's ongoing epistolary fiction, From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate . Like the first two volumes, Bedouin Hornbook and Djbot Baghostus' Run, this work is written by the composer/multi-instrumentalist N., a founding member of a band formerly known as the Mystic Horn Society. The letters in Atet A.D. span a seven-month period beginning shortly after Thelonious Monk's death and culminating in the band recording their first album on John Coltrane's birthday. Rendered in N.'s distinctive mix of discursive registers, they chronicle and meditate upon, among other events, Penguin's return from seclusion, N.'s recurring cowrie shell attacks, the band's adoption of a new name, and their being beset, beginning with a gig in Seattle, by a new, perplexing twist in their expressive powers. "As with all of Mackey's prose fiction, his hermeneutic speculations are advanced as much by the power of puns as by syllogistic reasoning. For all the wordplay, Mackey manages to cover a lot of ground in this neo-novel, which is not so much about "characters" as it is about ideas and themes like gender equality, the survival of African customs and spiritual values in America, and the play of dreams within our waking realities. Most idiosyncratically, Mackey, with his nuanced knowledge of jazz, convinces the reader that music operates like a language, with all the power to convey, say, a specific feminist critique of male-centered jazz culture, or to acquire levels of symbolism that would make Dante wonder if he should have taken up sax."— Publishers Weekly " Atet A.D. is a fascinating work of poetic/musical fiction-storytelling that plays with, and is inspired by, language and the mystical concepts and connections that arise unbidden from the manipulation of metaphor and meaning, while simultaneously fueled by the sounds and energy of American jazz which Mackey views as a source of spiritual and sexual discipline and discovery."—Art Lange, Pulse Nathaniel Mackey, recipient of a 1993 Whiting Writers’ Award, is the author of School of Udhra and Whatsaid Serif, both also published by City Lights Publishers. He won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2006, was awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2014, and won Yale's Bollingen Prize for American Poetry in 2015. He teaches a poetry workshop at Duke University.

The Great American Jazz Novel by Nathaniel Mackey, winner of the 2006 National Book Award. Los Angeles, October 1982: Molimo m'Atet, formerly known as the The Mystic Horn Society, is preparing to release its new album Orphic Bend. The members of the jazz ensemble—Aunt Nancy, Djamilaa, Drennette, Lambert, N., and Penguin—are witness to a strange occurrence: while listening to their test pressing, the moment Aunt Nancy's bass solo begins a balloon emerges from the vinyl, bearing a mysterious message: I dreamt you were gone.... Through letters N. writes to a figure called Angel of Dust, the ever-mutating story unfolds, leaving no musician or listener untouched. Bass Cathedral is Mackey's fourth volume in his ongoing novel with no beginning or end, From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate. Thought balloons morph into mute-stereoptic emanations; N. encounters a master mouthpiece-maker; Drennette leaves Penguin dateless; Lambert's kicking it around with Melanie—much is abuzz but something else is happening to the ensemble. The music seems to be living them. N. suffers cowrie shell attacks and they are all stranded on an Orphic Shore. Socio-political forces are at play or has this always been the essence and accident of the music's resilience? And Hotel Didjeridoo must be resurrected, but how? Myth spins music spins thought spins sex—Mackey's post-bop boxless box set is, as the Utne Reader wrote, "Avant-garde literature you can love: an evolving multivolume novel of the jazz world that plays with language and ideas the way Thelonious Monk plays with flatted fifths."

A new volume of the singular, ongoing, great American jazz novel Nathaniel Mackey’s Late Arcade opens in Los Angeles. A musician known only as N. writes the first of a series of letters to the enigmatic Angel of Dust. N.’s jazz sextet, Molimo m’Atet, has just rehearsed a new the horn players read from The Egyptian Book of the Dead with lips clothespinned shut, while the rest of the band struts and saunters in a cosmic hymn to the sun god Ra. N. ends this breathless session by sending the Angel of Dust a cassette tape of their rehearsal. Over the next nine months, N.’s epistolary narration follows the musical goings-on of the ensemble. N. suffers from what he calls “cowrie shell at- tacks”―oil spills, N.’s memory of his mother’s melancholy musical Sundays― which all becomes the source of fresh artistic invention. Here is the newest installment of the National Book Award-winner Nathaniel Mackey’s From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, the great American jazz novel of “exquisite rhythmic lyricism” ( Bookforum ).

The great American jazz novel of “such exquisite rhythmic lyricism” ( Bookforum ) by National Book Award Winner Nathaniel Mackey. From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Volumes 1-3 collects the first three installments― Bedouin Hornbook, Djbot Baghostus’s Run, and Atet A.D.―of Nathaniel Mackey’s genre-defying work of fiction. A project that began over thirty years ago, From a Broken Bottle is an epistolary novel that unfolds through N.’s intricate letters to the mysterious Angel of Dust. Unexpected, profound happenings take place as N. delves into music and art and the goings-on of his transmorphic Los Angeles-based jazz ensemble, in which he is a composer and instrumentalist. This triple-set book opens in July 1978 with a dream of a haunting Archie Shepp solo, and closes in September 1982 in a parallactic studio recording session on a glass-bottomed boat borne aloft by the music. The fourth volume of Mackey’s novel, Bass Cathedral ―also available from New Directions―was chosen by The New York Times as one of 100 Notable Books of 2008. But that it didn’t end there…