Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers

by Stanley Elkin, Chirs Lehmann (Introduction)

These nine stories reveal a dazzling variety of styles, tones and subject matter. Among them are some of Stanley Elkin’s finest, including the fabulistic “On a Field, Rampant,” the farcical “Perlmutter at the East Pole,” and the stylized “A Poetics for Bullies.” Despite the diversity of their form and matter, each of these stories shares Elkin’s nimble, comic, antic imagination, a dedication to the value of form and language, and a concern with a single the tragic inadequacy of a simplistic response to life.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Literature, American, 20th Century, Humor, College

272 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1965

About the author

Stanley Lawrence Elkin was a Jewish American novelist, short story writer, and essayist. His extravagant, satirical fiction revolves around American consumerism, popular culture, and male-female relationships.

During his career, Elkin published ten novels, two volumes of novellas, two books of short stories, a collection of essays, and one (unproduced) screenplay. Elkin's work revolves about American pop culture, which it portrays in innumerable darkly comic variations. Characters take full precedence over plot.

His language throughout is extravagant and exuberant, baroque and flowery, taking fantastic flight from his characters' endless patter. "He was like a jazz artist who would go off on riffs," said critic William Gass. In a review of George Mills, Ralph B. Sipper wrote, "Elkin's trademark is to tightrope his way from comedy to tragedy with hardly a slip."

About the influence of ethnicity on his work Elkin said he admired most "the writers who are stylists, Jewish or not. Bellow is a stylist, and he is Jewish. William Gass is a stylist, and he is not Jewish. What I go for in my work is language."

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stanley Elkin’s stories are set at the borderline of realism and postmodernism but he always remains fresh, highly original and scathingly sardonic.

Would a crier listen to another man’s complaints? Could a kibitzer kid a kidder? But it didn’t mean anything, he thought. Not the jokes, not the grief. It didn’t mean anything. They were like birds making noises in a tree. But try to catch them in a deal. They’d murder you.

That’s a portrait of modern society.
Guest is the beat generation heroics turned inside out.
On a Field, Rampant is a postmodern fairytale of the prince in exile.
Cousin Poor Lesley and the Lousy People is a nostalgic trip through the alienated coming-of-age scenes.
Perlmutter at the East Pole is a mocking treatise on the meaning of life.

The most perfidious instrument in all human language is the question. There is no room or time in life for questions. Questions are the breeding ground of dissension, atheistic pestilence and war. Look at your tragic secular literature: Faust is punished for asking questions. Oedipus is. Hell is a questioner’s answer.

To think is dangerous so get your ideas “from a popular song. That’s where the ideas are.”

[Guille · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lean estos cuentos, de los mejores que he leído en mucho tiempo… vale, no todos son igual de maravillosos, pero solo por tres de ellos —Llorones y kibitzers, kibitzers y llorones, El invitado y Poética para acosadores— deberían leerlo todos ustedes. De hecho, de los nueve relatos que reúne el libro, solo hay dos que me gustaron poquito.

Y pensar que Elkin solo tiene dos libros publicados en España, un tío que ha ganado dos veces el National Books Circle Award, que ha sido finalista del PEN Faulkner Award y del National Book Award, admirado por autores como Richard Ford, Saul Bellow, Cynthia Ozick, William H. Gass y, no menos importante, requeteadmirado a partir de ahora también por mí mismo. Editores, por favor, hagan su trabajo y corrijan este gran error.

“Su hijo en la tumba. Bajo toda aquella tierra. Bajo todo aquel polvo. En una caja metálica. Hermética, había dicho el director de la funeraria. Ay, Dios mío, «hermética». «Sellada al vacío». Como un bote de café. Su hijo estaba bajo tierra y en la calle los maniquíes de los escaparates lucían los modelos de la temporada próxima.”

Lo que les digo, lean estos cuentos y comprenderán mi sorpresa. Una sorpresa que se acrecentó al descubrir que uno de los cuentos, el que en España da título al libro (en USA escogieron el de otro de los cuentos: Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers), ya lo había leído en la nunca suficientemente bien valorada antología del cuento norteamericano de Richard Ford y, aunque me gustó, no me alertó sobre el autor al que olvidé de inmediato. Bueno, no quiero ser muy duro con mi yo de hace tanto tiempo, venga, me perdono, pelillos a la mar.

“Era la cama más grande en la que iba a dormir jamás. Siempre pensaba en esos términos. De pronto, un cigarrillo cualquiera se convertía en su cabeza en el mejor o en el peor que se fumaría ese día. Ejecutado con inusual soltura, un acto tan cotidiano como atarse los cordones de los zapatos podía ser recordado para siempre. Esto, indirectamente, teñía de tristeza su visión de la vida, pues sabía que a cada momento estaba viviendo experiencias que no volverían a repetirse nunca.”

¿Y qué se van a encontrar aquí? Pues, presentados con un estilo soberbio, original, lírico en ocasiones, se las verán con todo un plantel de perdedores, descentrados y patéticos rebeldes sin causa, todos masculinos y judíos, que el autor disfruta en poner ante situaciones difíciles o peculiares, aunque cotidianas, creando una turbadora atmósfera de desastre inminente, más turbadora cuanto más humorístico, corrosivo y negro es el tono. Un puñado de capullos a los que Elkin golpea para volverlos a levantar con el único propósito de darles un porrazo aún más fuerte del que también se recuperan solo para recibir un nuevo golpe, y así sufren y no saben cómo protegerse, se encaminan al precipicio y no saben cómo parar, hacen justo lo que no deberían hacer y no pueden evitarlo. No sé ustedes, pero yo no puedo evitar gozar viendo cómo estos humanos se joden la vida de esa forma tan malsana e incoherente, aunque el gozo sea casi siempre agridulce y puede que hasta un poco autocompasivo. Parece que no hay esperanza, hay que afrontarlo, amigos.

“Yo soy Push el acosador, y odio a los niños nuevos y a los mariquitas, a los listos y a los tontos, a los niños ricos, a los pobres, a los niños con gafas, a los que hablan raro, a los presumidos, a los que se las dan de buenos y a los que se las dan de listos, a los que pasan lápices y a los que riegan las plantas. Y a los tullidos, sobre todo a los tullidos. No amo a nadie que sea amado ... Me habría gustado tener otros ojos, otras manos, una madre en el supermercado...(Saben qué me hace llorar? La Declaración de Independencia. «Todos los hombres nacen iguales.» Precioso.)

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

We all, I would hazard, have someone in our life whose presence is pure pleasure, and whose habits, whose character traits, their ticks and tocks, often irritating to others, slip through us un-sensed, leave us unruffled and starry-eyed. Perhaps they talk too much about themselves. Perhaps they are always late. Perhaps they intend to vote conservative in the coming general election in the UK.

The same, as you could predict I would say, applies to authors. I am sure you can all think of a book that others have hated which you adore. Taste is a tricky, ticklish thing.

Elkin has some habits. Habits that some find intensely off-putting. Some find his language at the micro level becomes sickly, too much, overpowering. I love it. I love his rants and his riffs, his rhetorical houses of cards tottering under the weight of their own verboseness. It is all voice. Vaudevillian. Exhibitionist. Loud. Character is voice. What plot there is comes from that.

Look, even at the title of this collection. It tells you everything you need to know about his genius with language. To hear the reversed repetition. The music of it.

The character is outside a luncheonette:

"Even without going inside he knew what it would be like. The criers and the kibitzers. The criers, earnest, complaining with a familiar vigor about their businesses, their gas mileage, their health; their despair articulate, dependably lamenting their lives, vaguely mourning conditions, their sorrow something they could expect no one to understand. The kibitzers, deaf to grief, winking confidently at the others, their voices high-pitched in kidding or lowered in conspiracy to tell of triumphs, of men they knew downtown, of tickets fixed, or languishing goods moved suddenly and unexpectedly, of the windfall that was life; their fingers sticky, smeared with the sugar from their rolls."

(and what is a kibitzer, you ask? Your poor yiddish is forgiven, of course - 'tis someone who looks on and often offers unwanted advice or comment. A great word.)

Obviously I would be lying if I claimed all these stories worked wonders for me, but that is inevitable in any collection. Certainly, too, this is early Elkin, and some of his flair is strangely muted at times. His obsession with death and ill-health is, however, already fully-formed.

Harold Brodkey did a great Afterword too. Reminds me I should give him a try. In particular his reference to a trinity of Elkin, Gass and Davenport is one with which I heartily concur

If you are unsure of Elkin, or have been put off by some of his others, I would certainly suggest giving this a go. It may also serve as a good "intro" for those of you yet to dive in.

[Larou]

Sometimes an author who is very obviously right up your alley inexplicably manages to slip underneath your radar, and when you discover him years later you find yourself faced with a huge backlist and gnashing your teeth that you did not come across this astonishing body of work earlier. Stanley Elkin is just such a case for me; by all rights, I should have stumbled over him in the early to mid eighties when I was discovering contemporary American literature for myself and started reading the likes of Thomas Pynchon, John Barth and Robert Coover. Instead, I first enountered him as late as 2011 through a series of posts on one of the blogs I follow.

I read Boswell, Stanley Elkin’s first novel, a few months back, and while I liked it, I had some difficulties seeing why everyone kept saying that it was so funny. No such problem with Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers, Elkin’s first collection of stories (some of which predate Boswell) which had me laughing out loud a lot, even – or, coming to think about it, in particular – in places where the subject matter of the story did not appear to lend itself to humour at all.

This starts off with the title story, about a store owner who returns to work after the death of his son – the story manages to be at the same time very funny, when the protagonist’s paranoia runs rampant, suspecting everyone and their grandmother of robbing him blind, and heartbreakingly sad, the portrait of a man whose implicit trust in the benevolence of life has been shattered and who tries to carry on in the face of despair.

“Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers” is, like most of the nine stories in this collection and as Stanley Elkin himself remarks upon in his Preface to the 1990 edition, “right bang smack dab in the middle of realism,” something he’d outgrow later, and which is already apparent in some of the stories here, and it is certainly no coincidence that those tend to be the best of the lot. The volume’s stories also establishes the mood for what is to come, it’s distinctive interweaving of farce and tragedy can be found – to a varying degree and played out in different ways – in all of the following stories.

My personal favourite is “Poetics for Bullies,” a story whose driving, insistent rhythm grabs you at your jacket lapels right from the start and then pushes and pummels you relentlessly for the entire duration of its 20 pages. There is something very Rabelaisian about it (and, I suspect, about Elkin’s writing in general), in the larger-than-life characters, the exuberance of the writing and the way even the apparently most stable conventions and preconceptions are tumbling and turned topsy-turvy. In the case of this particular story we end up thoroughly disliking the character who is a shining example of pretty much every virtue imaginable and rooting for his antagonist, a low-life bully named Push, even wondering if bullies might not indeed be fulfulling a very useful social function… “Poetics for Bullies” is brilliant on every level and alone worth getting this collection. And while none of the other stories is quite as good, there is no really weak story here either, I’m really looking forward to reading more from Stanley Elkin.

[Graham P · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stanley Elkin is the king of writing about the half glass empty. All his characters ride a delusional wave, seeking meaning in a fast-moving whirlwind where humanity is elusive and pain is prevalent. This collection of existential comedies is full of sad souls meandering urban spaces like dirty laundry left behind in the laundromat. Bodegas turn into temples of remorse. City parks become doom-ridden sanctuaries. Apartments turn into asylums. And every story feels like a complicated joke with a heart-bruising punchline, reading like Beckett on the Borscht Belt. Metaphor is everything with Elkin. Not a mediocre story in the bunch, but my favorites: 'Cries & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers', 'In the Alley', 'Poetics for Bullies', and 'Perlmutter at the East Pole.'

Some favorite passages:

"Every day they came to eat their lunch and make their noises. Like cowboys on television hanging up their gun belts to go to a dance." - Criers & Kibitzers

"'But I tell you this friends. I would rather be a mustached bum than clean-shaven clerk. I'll work. Sure I will. When they pay anarchists! When they subsidize the hip! When they give grants to throw bombs! When they shell out for gainsaying.' Bertie pulled the curtain and turned on the faucet. The rush of water was like applause." - The Guest

"He held in contempt all those who professed disenchantment with the drugs they had been raised on, and frequently went back to rediscover the old pleasures of marijuana, as a sentimental father might chew some of his boy's bubble gum." - The Guest

[Mateo Toledo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Muy ácido.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

These are some of the most heart wrenching American tales of disease and death and isolation and despair, but at the same time, they burst with life and language that no other author can provide. Critics often label Elkin as a comic writer, but these are not comedies. They are, perhaps, humorous tragedies, certainly not dark comedies, in that hope is lost for any sort of redemption for any character found within. But the stories and the language show so much of the intricacies of the stuff of life, that one gets the sense that Elkin's message, above all else, was that this world is shit, but it's good and interesting and pleasing enough for one to be crazy to stop fighting for life. Elkin himself, chronically unhealthy, had to fight every moment.

In "Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers" Elkin gets at, so fully, the state of mind of a man mourning the death of his son, the awkward embarrassment, jealousy and vengeful rage, all set in a small town grocery with its sad depths of social strata and its paranoia in its tiny profit margin. The man holds up the memory of his son above all reproach and finding the note which has so much meaning to him, but says nothing at all, strikes a resonant chord with me.

"I Look Out For Ed Wolfe," an orphan's tale of losing and selling everything, reducing a man to his cash value, shows a more clinical American Psycho where life is confined to collections, sales, haggles and bids. In the end, Ed Wolfe, a white boy enacts some craziness at a black juke joint, puts a girl up on an auction block and holds her hand, which is more vital than his ever could be.

"Among The Witnesses," the tale of a Catskills resort cheapo shocked by a little girl's drowning under the watch of an underage lifeguard, follows Preminger, a flat man, droning on to lay Norma. Everything is else is an inconvenience. Everyone wants an excuse to be scared home, including Bieberman, drunk on Schnapps on the porch.

"The Guest" is a drug riddled multiple personality rant of a bum jazz house sitter, in which Elkin gets the cadence of being alone and talking to yourself, thinking to yourself, exactly right on perfect. Bertie's rebellion is selfish, wasteful and lazy. He will always be looking for a patron.

"In The Alley," the story of a man with a death sentence from his doctor who just won't die, shows the awkwardness and alienation and complete loneliness of dying. He's never fought the disease, only worried that he hasn't died, and that his diagnosis has not been fulfilled, like Norman Mailer walking through Harlem at midnight, but getting beat.

"On a Field, Rampant" is a forcefully vague story about a young man bequeathed fine clothes and a medallion who vaguely travels the world, apart from Khardov the watch repairman father, duping plebes into thinking he's royalty. In the end, he has built up a rage against these people, the dock workers and whores he belongs with, like someone trying to climb out of The Dubliners or suppressing their Jewishness in Roth or Bellow to live as a Habsburg.

In "A Poetics for Bullies" Push has got the whole neighborhood, his world, figured out and he knows his damage, but John Williams is too perfect to fit into that world and we can all relate to Push's distaste for a boy with such nice clothing and stories and a penchant for charity. "Get the rich boys in your sights and..." Push is victorious in some ritualized playground circle, when he resits, finally, Williams, who must please all, but never Push.

"Cousing Poor Lesley and the Lousy People" is a 40s Bronx nostalgia tale of bizarre losers, telling dirty jokes to ugly girls at City College parties. Eugene Lapransky's a sort of stupid guru in his exile in the apartment above his mother's house and his Black Matt ramblings. They all end up locked up or sleazy or dead like Poor Lesley who never got to fight, only to maneuver.

"Perlmutter at the East Pole" is a little dis to New York as the last place you'd look for meaning, and the last place you'd find it. Perlmutter's pliable New Yorkers depress and disappoint him, from cabbies to Rose Gold and the Union Square Park nest of vapid speakers.

[Michael Shou-Yung Shum · Rating 4 out of 5]

It wouldn't kill you to read this book.

[Christine · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was my first experience with Elkin, although I feel like he may have always been circling the sides of my reading lists like a guy at a bar it's too crowded to go and talk to, but you are both wearing the same NPR tote bag.

The thing I was least prepared for was the first title story, which, far from being any fabulist comedy was full of the painful emotions and mundane realism of surviving after a tragedy to get back to the everyday drama of a sinking ship business.

After that first story, the emotions remain crisp and as real as possible, but the story plots and characters grow more and more implausible, ending with the satirical "Permutter at the East Pole", which chronicles a high-minded adventurer of the Quartermain mold trying to make his way to find the almight Truth in a New York as mad as the main character.

Two highlights for me were:

"Poetics for Bullies" - a lyrical and fantastic tail about a bully who has a crisis of faith when he's not able to be successfully intimidating anymore.

"Among the Witnessess" - They never SAY Poconos here, but it's the idea of a mountain resort somewhat past its prime, where the guests seem as horrible as the staff running the place and it's one tragedy away from shutting its doors.

Some of the ridiculousness is put in place in the comitragic ("In the Alley") and the comi-annoying ("The Guest"), but the characters in all the stories are surprisingly well-formed. It's easy to picture all of the grocery store day-wagers in "Cries & Kibitzers..." and even the elusive Rose Gold in "Perlmutter at the North Pole" who is only glimpsed briefly and exists more as an idea than a real person to the narrator.

These are the kind of stories that can be read and interpreted differently at various life stages, completely dependent on the viewpoints of the young, the middle-aged, and the dying. (See also: Thoreau's 'Walden'.) I hope to re-read at those various stages myself.

[Leonard Pierce · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of short fiction by Stanley Elkin, this is a bit of a mixed bag. A few of these are sort of flat and inchoate, leading me to believe that the long form is really his strength, but in a few of them -- especially "In the Alley" and the hilarious "Perlmutter at the East Pole" -- are as good as anything he's done and show a real grasp of the medium.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

These are wonderful stories full of the humanness of people just trying to cope with life. Humorous, touching, and all that. They are beautifully and meticulously written. Some stories remind me a bit of Malamud. Regardless, they are stories that are worth the time to be familiar with.

[Kevin · Rating 3 out of 5]

i liked when it got weird.

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Elkin is one of those rare authors who is equally adept at short fiction and novels, and this collection of stories is a particularly strong sampling of Elkin at his strangest and most down-to-earth, his funniest and most heart-punchingly sad.

[Melting Uncle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of the stories I loved (Poetics for Bullies, The Guest, Perlmutter at the East Pole)
Most of the rest were good if occasionally a little confusing, as in "What was he going for here, exactly?"
One of the stories, the fifty page "On a Field, Rampant" was a complete chore to get through.

I actually read this entire book out loud to Kate, starting with in the car to Florida and finishing in our kitchen. It occurs to me now that since she was pregnant the whole time I was reading this, our baby son heard the entire book while gestating in the womb. I don't know what that will mean for him, maybe he'll take on some of the Rodney Dangerfield/Andrew Dice Clay literary spirit of the early Stanley Elkin stories.

Stanley Elking was friends with William Gaddis and went on to write other books that people seem to like including The Living End. His sensibility is mordant and his prose is a little flower-y, I think his style later became even more ornate and elaborate, maybe I'm confusing him with Harold Brodkey? I glanced through Stanley Elkin's book of essays called Pieces of Soap which included a really unpleasant passage where he imagined himself as a child molester... very edgy.

You may want to read this if you're surveying American short story writers of the 60's-80's. In an interview with Gordon Lish he compared the role of the writer to the bully in "Poetics for Bullies"... that story felt like a tour de force. It's so good that most of the others pale in comparison.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Basicly my recomendation is where it's at.

Now, I haven't finnished all the shorts in this yet, and they are a little long for today's standards, but they hard work has pay off and it isn't as hard as, say, Joyce or pick your fav unreadable author.

there is a story about a mescline adict who is in a house going crazy for a day and it is how those people act. I've lived with them. the kid gets robbed (he's house sitting) and he says, well, they will think I'm worthless, and pitty me, so he robs a little extra, and runs off like he did the whole thing.

Now I'm not smart enough to disect that, but i'm keen enough to know that's good reads.

4 erect penis for this book.

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

No other story in this collection quite matches "Push" in style or execution of concept, but there's plenty of humor and jazz to be found in several of the better ones, particularly the closer, which seems less beholden to naturalism than do some of the less exuberant attempts. I'm not sure when Elkin wrote which of these pieces, but the way they're assembled here allows them to gain momentum as the reader pages through.

[Krok Zero · Rating 3 out of 5]

Five out of nine ain't bad. Especially when one of those five is "A Poetics for Bullies," one of the best short stories I have read.

[Bebop2 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Short story collections are a problem to rate. Some deserved 4 but I think overall 3 stars makes sense. This was not as strong as his later novels.

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm Push the bully. I push through.

[Frederic · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book was recommended by hilarious, young author Simon Rich, whose book Ant Farm I really enjoyed, but I absolutely hated this book. Obnoxious, despairing characters being rude to other characters.

I bailed out 27% of the way through, after two stories. Torture. The other, Rich recommended, well written book I disliked was T.C. Boyle's big compendium of stories. In both cases, the writing was good, but I disliked the plots and characters so much that it didn't matter.

[Art]

For the most part, I did not enjoy reading this book. There were some parts that I found more tolerable than others, but I forced myself to look over the text each time I opened the book. It's a book of short stories that are fairly weird. Fortunately, there are some funny parts, but very few and far between. Most of the stories are not very short, and they drag because the characters are unpleasant. I found it a dull read.

[Easy B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Big voices

[Richard O. · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first came across a Stanley Elkin story in an anthology The Single Voice co-edited by my CCNY teacher, novelist Mark Jay Mirsky. Then I read this collection. Though well-reviewed, Elkin was never inducted into the oft-cited Jewish pantheon of Bellow, Roth and Malamud, although he could be equally as comic and possessed of a Joycean style or styles. That is to say, he had a staggering array of tones and subjects. I read a few of Elkin's novels like The Dick Gibson Show (1971), concluding that his talents were best suited to the story--its compression, its limitations of scope, its rhythms. Elkin was a comic genius of a kind.

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ach. The story. The American story. The Garrison Keillor blurb of the front cover tells you a great deal in itself. This is, I guess, a purified, distilled dollop of early stuff from Elkin. I am only getting around to Elkin now. This is my first Elkin. His preface (written by he himself, for an edition published more than twenty years subsequent to the first) suggests that he would go on to be more of a ... stylist. Indeed, he was famous to me (through hearsay, natch) as a guy who can get wild and wooly w/ language and vernacular. So these are the germinal Elkins. Presumably more conventional than what would follow. And indeed the bulk of this stuff (excluding "On a Field, Rampant" and "Perlmutter at the East Poll," which are the obvious outliers), invokes the towering, oppressive, and humbling (not to mention arguably toxically influential) John Cheever. But this is a Cheever askew. A little cockeyed. There is a resin of a different breed of disenchantment. I assume that the stories were probably written from approximately the late 50s to the mid 60s. So there is underneath it all the sense of a viewpoint plugged into a national gestalt. We are talking the dawn of sexual revolution, the ubiquity of civil rights unrest. The fuse, alas, had already been lit, but the countercutural powder keg had not yet ignited. This was a very special time to be cataloguing American mores and anxieties. And for the most part these stories are pretty great. The one clear exception is "Among the Witnesses," which serves as one of those little slices of life (in the midst of travail), always so in vogue, and which amounts to practically nothing. "The Guest," however, featuring two characters from "Witnesses" in supporting roles, is a masterful piece of comic American fiction which could genuinely hold up to anything. And I love that the book ends w/ "Perlmutter at the East Pole," a story which hints at whole new antic lines of flight, and could properly be assessed as (Groucho) Marxist.

[Mckinley · Rating 1 out of 5]

Read like period pieces. Didn't like the first one but read on.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great collection by Elkin who shines with the darkly comic short. Standouts for me were "I Lookout for Ed Wolfe", "Perlmutter at the East Pole" and "A Poetics for Bullies".

[S.W. Gordon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Assigned reading for MFA workshop

[ncbookshelf · Rating 3 out of 5]

i read this! that’s all.