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  • Published: 10 March 2020
  • ISBN: 9781681374314
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $32.99

Margery Kempe




Lust, religious zeal, and heartache come together in this provocative novel about two infatuations, one between a man and his young lover in the late 20th century and another between a 15th-century maiden and Jesus Christ.

Lust, religious zeal, and heartache come together in this provocative novel about two infatuations, one between a man and his young lover in the late 20th century and another between a 15th-century woman and Jesus Christ.

First published in 1994, Robert Glück’s Margery Kempe is one of the most provocative, poignant, and inventive American novels of the last quarter century. The book tells two stories of romantic obsession. One, based on the first autobiography in English, the medieval Book of Margery Kempe, is about a fifteenth-century woman from East Anglia, a visionary, a troublemaker, a pilgrim to the Holy Land, and an aspiring saint, and her love affair with Jesus. It is complicated. The other is about the author’s own love for an alluring and elusive young American, L. It is complicated. Between these two Margery Kempe, the novel, emerges as an unprecedented exploration of desire, devotion, abjection, and sexual obsession in the form of a novel like no other novel. Robert Glück’s masterpiece bears comparison with the finest work of such writers as Kathy Acker and Chris Kraus. This edition includes an essay by Glück about the creation of the book titled "My Margery, Margery's Bob."

  • Published: 10 March 2020
  • ISBN: 9781681374314
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $32.99

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Praise for Margery Kempe

"By the bold device of telling two stories in terms of each other (one of Margery Kempe and Jesus, and the other of a twentieth-century love affair), Robert Gluck has produced a book without precedent. This novel brings to mind the huge wings of a painted angel--a texture of brilliant richness covered regularly with small, detailed shadows of implication." --Thom Gunn

"At once embracing and thwarting two worlds, two centuries, two sensibilities, what a subtle and powerful amalgam is Margery! Gluck's exquisitely controlled, sensuously textured writing evokes a deeply integrated ecstatic vision that in the end spares us nothing--being nuanced and brutal, passionate and colored with levity, elegant and outrageous." --Lydia Davis

"I, for one, find much to admire in contemporary gay authors. One of my favorites is Robert Gluck." --Edmund White

"Gluck reminds one of Genet and the transmutation of sex into something beyond sex. Not since Genet have we seen such pure love of the body and soul--seen as one palpable flesh." --William S. Burroughs

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