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Bradford Morrow

 


Everything comes back to ideas harnessed within sounds: utterance.  Words are the oldest fossils.
Primordial, primeval.

from an interview with Bradford Morrow
in
The Review of Contemporary Fiction.

 

 


Ariel’s Crossing, Bradford Morrow’s most recent book, was published by Viking on June 10, 2002.  Bradford Morrow will be reading in Denver and Boulder on June 26th and 27th.  Click here for his current Reading Tour. 

 

Bradford Morrow worked as a jazz musician, translator, medical assistant, bookseller, and at various other jobs before founding the literary journal Conjunctions in 1981.  Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Morrow grew up in Colorado, and--after a decade of vagabonding from Honduras to France, Italy to England-- settled in New York City, where he has lived for the past two decades.

The first of his five novels, Come Sunday (1988; recently republished) was followed by the publication of A Bestiary (1991), The Almanac Branch (which was a finalist for the 1992 PEN/ Faulkner Award), Trinity Fields (finalist for the 1995 Los Angeles Times Book Award), Giovanni's Gift, and most recently Ariel’s Crossing.

Conjunctions, celebrating over 20 years of existence, has published the work of over 1000 innovative contemporary writers and artists, and was praised by novelist Robert Coover as "without exception, America's leading literary journal, one of the greatest such magazines in the literary history of the country." Morrow has taught at Princeton, Brown, and Columbia Universities, as well as the Naropa Institute, and is now Professor of Literature and Bard Center Fellow at Bard College. Morrow serves on the Board of Trustees of PEN American Center, where he chairs the PEN Forums Committee. He recently received the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Viking has just published his new novel, Ariel’s Crossing, the second volume of his New Mexico trilogy, the first of which was Trinity Fields, reissued simultaneously in a new paperback edition from Penguin.  He is at work on a new novel, The Prague Sonatas, and a collection of short fiction, Amazing Grace, whose title story was shortlisted for this year’s O. Henry Prize and won a Pushcart Prize.  For selected bibliography, click here.

 

An excerpt from
Giovanni's Gift



Events and Readings


Excerpts From Other Novels by Bradford Morrow

Trinity Fields
The Almanac Branch
Come Sunday


Excerpts From Other Works by Bradford Morrow

The Emerson Madrigal
The Night Watch
The Journey to Trinity
Meditations on a Shadow


The Art of Fiction

The Channah Tales
Rivages Roses for Neils Bohr
A Gift to Literature, the Beatrice Interview
"The Jim Lewis interview with Bradford Morrow"

 

Bradford Morrow, from A Bestiary
Before the dawn of history, when the earth was still flat and the oceans ran out to the edges and fell off into space, back so far in time the sun had not yet risen, the world was a very dark place, so dark that the sea and sky seemed the same. In that olden era the whale roved the wind, forsaking the sea, as he had no desire to be wet. He ranged through the unlit clouds with birds now long extinct, some of which looked like forks and spoons, some like staple guns. He basked in moonglow which darkened his skin to a pale gray, and stargazed, and bothered no one else who made his home in the heavens. Only the mariners who' set forth from the land to discover the ends of the earth found the whale to be a problem. What little light gave from the moon and stars, light by which they tied their ancient knots and fixed their rigging, was obscured whenever the great, slow blimp of a whale passed over. Enough, said these sailors, and brought him down with nets, hoping to drown him in the ocean beneath their bow. What happened next we all know, as now of course the whale we think of as only in the sea. True, he didn't notice the difference much, and came to love the feeling of water on his flesh. The splash he made when the mariners caught him caused the waterfall edges of the earth to crumble, and the ocean rolled in rivers, and the earth became round. In this way, without even meaning to, the whale behaved less like a blimp or bird or any other thing which roams the sky than a god, for he helped to fashion the world in his own image.

More Selections from Bradford Morrow's work:


A Bestiary

 

Email Bradford Morrow


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