First, the Raven: A Preface
Description
Sy Kirschbaum has spent almost twenty years in Prague translating legendary Czech dissident Jan Horak’s samizdat masterpiece, Blue, Red, Gray. On the cusp of finishing, he is called back to his Maine hometown to see his troubled former lover, Ida Fields, now the wife of their childhood friend Gabe Slatky. But before he can see her, Sy must meet with Gabe for an evening at a local bar, an encounter that becomes a test of their old friendship and their dueling accounts of reality. In the conversation that follows, narratives of past and present—of art and life—interweave with perfect inevitability, yet with unpredictable, even shocking consequences, spiraling Sy and Gabe into confusion, doubt, and despair, without quite eroding, perhaps, the possibility of hope.
First, the Raven: A Preface is a quietly yet profoundly radical work, as ingenious as a print by Escher or a Möbius strip: the Reader must glide along its whole immaculately ramified length before realizing how deeply life, despite its unceasing, nearly flawless appearance of normalcy, is upside down.
Sagging Meniscus Press
210pp.
Publication Date: September 15, 2017
Available online at Indiebound, Barnes and Noble, Powell’s, Amazon, and SPD
Notices
First, the Ravenruns broad and deep; it is an intelligent and inventive introduction to a voice of extraordinary power and promise.
—Jacob M. Appel
The narrative is all at once intensely personal and historical, playfully esoteric and resolutely seducing.
—Magdaléna Platzová
…wise novel about friends, foreign countries, and friends as foreign countries. I raise a glass to Rogoff’s First.
—Joshua Cohen
First, the Raven is a brilliant and inspired work of fiction—both a profound novel of ideas and an elegant piece of storytelling.”
—Michael Dahlie
Rogoff’s book shimmers in the reflections of all its levels and subplots, some of them only ever dimly seen.
—Thomas Urquhart