Joel Agee

The son of acclaimed writer James Agee delivers a beautiful and haunting recreation of his childhood, when his mother fled America for Mexico, and raised him amid a circle including expat European communists, local labor activists, and even Frida Kahlo . . . Joel Agee's hallucinatory first novel begins in a house with a large garden in an unnamed Mexican town in the late 1940s, where six-and-a-half-year-old Peter reads, dreams, and plays with his friends. He is a nascent explorer, artist, philosopher, mystic, and scientist. His world is still new, not yet papered over with received knowledge. And the actual world around him is a unique one in history: a community of leftist emigr s who have found refuge in Mexico from the Nazi and fascist regimes of Europe, rubbing shoulders with Mexican labor activists and leftists such as Frida Kahlo. But the emigr s long for home -- including Peter's step-father, who wants to return to his native Germany. Going back to Europe may not be safe for any of them yet, however, which gives rise to anguished arguments among Peter's parents's and their tight group of friends. And slowly, Peter begins to comprehend that his world may be turned upside down - that he might be forced to take leave of everyone he knows: his best friend, Ar n; his father's friend S ndor, who talks about revolution and performs magic tricks; and Zita, the family's live-in-maid, who has taught him the consoling mysteries of prayer . . . Steeped in the magic and myths of childhood -- yet haunted by a harsh adult world bedeviled by instability and political turmoil -- Joel Agee's The Stone World is an unforgettable portrait of a family that will inevitably invite comparison with another classic family story, that of his father James Agee's A Death in the Family.

From the author of 'A Man without Qualities, ' a novel about spirituality in the modern world. Agathe is the sister of Ulrich, the so-called "man without qualities" who is the major character in Robert Musil's great, unfinished novel of that name. Ulrich is intellectual and skeptical and rebellious and yet for all that rule-bound, held hostage by his attraction to the systematic, even if every existing system--political, ethical, metaphysical--strikes this onetime mathematician as fundamentally suspect. When, however, after many years Ulrich and his younger sister, Agathe, reunite over the bier of their dead father, a celebrated lawyer, both siblings are electrified. They are, for one thing, almost each other's spitting image, while Agathe, who has just separated from her husband, is even more resistant to any kind of status quo than her brother. Engaging in a series of ever more intense and questioning "holy conversations," brother and sister progressively enlarge the boundaries of sexuality, sensuality, and identity, seeking to arrive at a new conception of reality that they are sure lies within each other to discover. Musil's Agathe, or the Forgotten Sister is one of the most unexpected and breathtaking adventures of twentieth-century fiction, while Joel Agee's new English translation captures all the nuance of Musil's famously acute and penetrating style.

"Prometheus Bound" is the starkest and strangest of the classic Greek tragedies, a play in which god and man are presented as radically, irreconcilably at odds. It begins with the shock of hammer blows as the Titan Prometheus is shackled to a rock in the Caucasus. This is his punishment for giving the gift of fire to humankind and for thwarting Zeus's decision to exterminate the human race. Prometheus's pain is unceasing, but he refuses to recant his commitment to humanity, to whom he has also brought the knowledge of writing, mathematics, medicine, and architecture. He hints that he knows how Zeus will be brought low in the future, but when Hermes demands that Prometheus divulge his secret, he refuses and is sent spinning into the abyss by a divine thunderbolt. To whom does humanity look for guidance: to the supreme deity or to the rebel Titan? What law controls the cosmos? "Prometheus Bound," one of the great poetic achievements of the ancient world, appears here in a splendid new translation by Joel Agee that does full justice to the harsh and keening music of the original Greek.

In the spring of 1964, Joel Agee, not quite at home in his native New York (having spent much of his boyhood and youth behind the Iron Curtain), accidentally ingests a sizeable dose of LSD. All at once he is thrown from the precincts of bohemian normalcy into a whirl of bizarre synchronicities, symbols and omens. Nothing is ever the same again. Thirty years later a sobered Joel Agee sets himself the task of recounting his adventures. He begins as a memoirist, but the truth he is seeking is not just that of memory. This book is a rescue mission  to find the ghosts of his past he must write his way into the house of his fear.

In the spring of 1964, Joel Agee, not quite at home in his native New York (having spent much of his boyhood and youth behind the Iron Curtain), accidentally ingests a sizeable dose of LSD. All at once he is thrown from the precincts of bohemian normalcy into a whirl of bizarre synchronicities, symbols and omens. Nothing is ever the same again. His brilliant, mentally ill younger brother is descending into a psychic netherworld without chemical inducement, and the culture at large, not to be outdone for surreal extremeness, is undergoing a mutation of its own: apocalypse and utopia appear to be equally imminent. A small inheritance comes Joel's way. Together with his wife and their infant daughter, he emigrates in search of kindred souls a picaresque journey that takes him through Spain, England, Italy, Switzerland, and France. On the way, a fantastic project takes root in his imagination: to exorcize his brother's madness by transforming his own consciousness, first with "acid," then in a quest for enlightenment under the tutelage of spiritual teachers. Thirty years later, a sobered Joel Agee now the author of the widely reviewed memoir, Twelve Years: An American Boyhood in East Germany sets himself the task of recounting his adventures.

Joel Agee, the son of James Agee, was raised for twelve years in East Germany, where his stepfather, the novelist Bodo Uhse, was a member of the privileged communist intelligentsia. This is the story of how young Joel failed to become a good communist, becoming instead a fine writer." A wonderfully evocative memoir. . . . Agee evoked for me the atmosphere of postwar Berlin more vividly than the actual experience of it—and I was there." —Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, New York Times"One of those rare personal memoirs that brings to life a whole country and an epoch." —Christopher Isherwood"Twelve Years consists of a series of finely honed anecdotes written in a precise, supple prose rich with sensual detail." —David Ghitelman, Newsday"By turns poetic and picturesque, Agee energetically catalogues his expatriate passage to manhood with a pinpoint eye and a healthy American distaste for pretension. . . . Huckleberry Finn would have . . . welcomed [him] as a soulmate on the raft." —J. D. Reed, Time"A triumph. . . . Unfettered by petty analysis or quick explanations, a story that is timeless and ageless and vital." —Robert Michael Green, Baltimore Sun