From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate by Nathaniel Mackey
From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate 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 a lifelong epistolary novel that unfolds through N.’s intimate letters to the mysterious Angel of Dust. Unexpected, profound happenings occur 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 multi-instrumentalist. The story opens in July 1978 with a dream of haunting Archie Shepp solo, and closes in September 1982 on a glass-bottomed boat borne aloft by the music. This edition also includes a discography, plus an author’s note that offers some reflections on the writings of this extraordinary novel—a realist-mythic layering of lyrical prose unlike anything being written today.
