The wonderful Laurie Price, poet/ artist / editor, takes MAX SEES RED on Mexican beach vacation. She has this to say:
“Wonderful! Plus structure & suspense & character development.”
Max Sees Red, by Martha King. An art world whodunit set in SoHo and the Hudson Valley in 1979. See Amazon or Spuyten Duyvil for ordering info.
“I love Martha King’s astutely roving eyes & ears, what & who she notices, how deftly she weaves perceptive commentary in & out of encounters, & especially how accurately she pegs the now faint smells of 1970s NYC’s low-key squalor crisscrossed by the ambitions & conflicts of its “aht” world. The book paces like a great film script, which makes this an absorbing page turner.” –Patrick Brennan
“Not only a clever mystery but a meditation on the fragility and interdependence of a community as it shakily weathers a blow to its integrity.” –Jim Feast from his glowing review in the current issue of Sensitive Skin
Please order from the publisher http://www.spuytenduyvil.net/max-sees-red.html Or a friendly indie bookseller. Or (gulp) Amazon.
Lovely episode on Don Yorty’s blog — combining images from Basil King’s Green Man Comes to 4th Street portraits with a reading by Baz of Part 7 of his long poem with the same name.
When I posted this on Facebook I said people might want to go through it twice — because I did. Despite being familiar with Basil’s images, the combination dazzles. [More to come. King is still working on this project.]
Martha and Basil King join in celebrating YUKO OTOMO’s new book
Anonymous Landscape (from Lithic Press) is a marvelous full-length meditation on anonymity and civility among other things. The Kings are delighted to join John Godfrey and Charles Waters in celebrating its publication at:
McNally Jackson Books – SOHO
52 Prince Street, between Broadway and Lafayette
Wednesday, September 18, at 7PM
Waters will play a clarinet solo inspired by the book. The book cover, like the poem, is subtle. See it live at the bookstore on September 18!
Fine review of my memoir in Golden Handcuffs
Excited to let everyone know that Ian Brinton has reviewed my memoir, Outside/Inside in issue 27, Vol 2, of Golden Handcuffs Literary Review. A very thoughtful review that places my book in finely drawn historical context.
If you subscribe (this is an excellent wide-ranging mag published IN PRINT) you’ve probably seen it as well as Brinton’s moving “Breaking Out” – on the life and work of the late Michael Rumaker. The Rumaker review is available on line; the review of my book is not.
Alas, I cannot post it here as the text is locked into a PDF. But I can attach it in an email. I’ll send it on request. Ask me!
MAX SEES RED — is King’s first-ever novel, a murder mystery in which a painter named Max tries to find out who murdered a young literary editor in her Hudson Valley summer house. One of his oldest friends, an experimental novelist, has bumbled into making himself a prime suspect.
The action takes place in the late 1970’s in SoHo bars, lofts, and galleries, and in Dutchess and Hudson counties just north of New York’s suburbia, then a landscape of impoverished small towns and abandoned farms. Artists who have begun to settle there have uneasy relationships with the rural poor and elite establishment landowners, and sometimes encounter a shadow neo-Nazi subculture.
The book is populated with painters, sculptors, poets, potters, critics, dealers, and hangers-on, both gay and straight, including newly rich Wall Street patrons and people in the “uptown” world of mainstream publishing.
ISBN 978-1-949966-06-0
256 pages
Available now on Amazon and on the Spuyten Duyvil website.
http://www.spuytenduyvil.net/max-sees-red.html
There will be a New York book launch and reading in May. Please come to Zinc Bar, Sunday May19, at 4:30. (82 West 3rd Street)
We have a new website name
You may still use www.basilking.net but when the home page opens you will see the new domain name: basilking-marthaking.com
This is the domain name going forward. The new name makes it clear that works by both of the Kings is presented here. We’ve also made some other adjustments to bring our site into 2019.
Enjoy.
tears in the fence, #69, Spring 2019 is now available.
This issue ranges wide as tears does — and includes Basil King’s new poem, “Pick Up a Stitch — Drop a Stitch,“ work by Laurie Duggan, and this comment by editor David Caddy on Martha King’s memoir, Outside/Inside:
Martha King’s memoir, Outside/Inside…just outside the art world’s inside (BlazeVOX books) is a beautifully written insight into the world of a young woman who studied at Black Mountain College in its last year, arriving with ‘an old hotplate two saucepans, some picnic cutlery’ and eventually fell in with artist and writer, Basil King. She chronicles her subsequent domestic and bohemian life, including a great many significant figures in and around Black Mountain, San Francisco, and New York art scenes. It is an absolute joy to read and leaves the reader uplifted by a deeply felt clarification of the importance of those movements, and with a broad smile. Amongst many highlights is the story of the wedding of the headstrong protagonists, which is both funny and memorable. King’s prose, warmly inviting, succinct and perceptive moves effortlessly from story to story, and is so giving in her generosity of spirit and emotional intelligence. This intimate portrait, dense with detail, of a critical period in American art and writing, is a page-turner, and sure to become a classic.
Lovely issue of an always essential independent international literary magazine.
Order and subscribe at www.tearsinthefence.com. Use the Donate button. Or mail an order with a check. Four issues for $40 (or $60 if airmail delivery is requested).
BTW, “Pick Up a Stitch” is Part Five of a chapbook-length piece called Basil’s Bean Book – not yet published.
A Predella for the Green Man