Charles Reznikoff's The Manner Music: A Book of Not's

Charles Reznikoff's The Manner Music is out-of-print. A posthumously published novel, forgotten amidst the wealth of his poetry, and undervalued (in terms of readership and critical examination), the opportunity to read the novel is a privilege. The circumstances by which the publisher of Black Sparrow Press John Martin discovered the book in 1976 makes a greater difference in the reading:

I have recently gone through Charles Reznikoff's lifetime accumulation of manuscripts, and was thunderstruck to find a carefully typed, completed novel, which he apparently never mentioned to anyone, or submitted for publication. It was, I think, composed in the early 1950's…

I believe this novel was written in response to a letter William Carlos Williams wrote Charles in the late 1940's, at a time when Charles' career was at a low ebb, urging him to continue writing at any cost, and if possible to write a novel…