Eileen Myles’ books include For Now (an essay/talk about writing), Afterglow (a dog memoir), I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems, and Chelsea Girls. The Trip, their super-8 puppet road film, can be seen on YouTube. Pathetic Literature (Grove Press) is a global anthology of pieces from lesser-known classics by luminaries like Franz Kafka, Samuel R. Delany, and Gwendolyn Brooks to up-and-coming writers that examine pathos and feeling, giving a well-timed rehab to the word “pathetic.” It’s an exuberant collection of pieces ranging from poetry to theater to prose to something in between, all of which explore those so-called “pathetic” or sensitive feelings around which lives are built and revolutions are incited. Myles first reclaimed “pathetic” for a seminar they taught, rescuing it from derision and restoring its original meaning of inspiring emotion or feeling from the Ancient Greek rhetorical method of pathos. The anthology includes 106 contributors, encompassing titans of global literature like Robert Walser, Jorge Luis Borges, Rumi, and Brooks; queer icons and revolutionaries like Dodie Bellamy, Bob Flanagan, and Delany; and writers on the rise including Nicole Wallace, Precious Okoyomon, and Will Farris.
