Virginia Dare – SAVE 50%!:

Stories 1976-1981

Breaking away from his typical first person autobiographical narration, Virginia Dare is the beginning of a new stage in Fielding Dawson’s career; a stage in which he employs “third person [narration], and open endings through transitions. ”  In his introduction Dawson explains that both the random topics of his stories and the unrelated characters make this collection a truer reflection of the human order, because in reality loose ends are not always tied up.

“Completion completes but its original potential in flow with what’s learned and discovered along the way, causing it to change, therefore – so too the narrative will change, leaving, in its wake, reflections of vivid yet often irrelevant-seeming loose ends that refract and sustain initial creation”

Additionally, Virginia Dare is an enthralling addition to any collection of contemporary writing, particularly for those who also enjoy the writing of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, Dawson’s fellow and better-known “beat generation” writers.

Fielding Dawson attended the famed Black Mountain College from 1949 to 1952, before settling in New York City where he became part of the Beat scene. Dawson is admired for his stream-of-consciousness style fiction with minimal punctuation, lax grammar, and naturalistic dialogue. Dawson wrote twenty-two books of short stories and memoirs, as well as a history of the Black Mountain College movement.

“Dawson’s ear for speech is im­peccable, but more startling is the way speech… is connected to thought, and how thought itself is formed in a seamless way in the author’s prose… [his] prose is complex, driven and quick, and the reader constantly feels he is en­countering the ruminations of the mind in ways he has never experienced before.” —New York Times Book Review

“No writer moves more aptly, quickly, closely, in the tracking of human dimensions of feeling and relation.” —Robert Creeley

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