Publisher's Synopsis
How can we re-write American identity? In this daring second edition of his celebrated cross-genre A and B and Also Nothing, Chris Campanioni reads and recasts his own life through the works of Henry James and Gertrude Stein. He does so with an amalgam of annotations, observations, aphorisms, and asides, dissolving the boundaries between journal and novel, autobiography and fiction. Then, he goes further, imagining several other books inside this one, including an exploration of the ways in which migrant illegality has been fabricated and shaped since -- and how this informs a critical evaluation of technology's role in capturing and containing bodies in life and text. It is the interplay of the real, the not real, and the not yet real that propels A and B and Also Nothing toward a fresh blueprint for American identity -- all captured through a notebook poetics that centers copying, collection, and recollection as primary creative acts. A and B and Also Nothing -- now with a new coda and photographs by the author -- is a call and response to the avant-garde, an attendance to the community of BIPOC writers who have often been overlooked despite their meaningful influence on American culture. In Campanioni's fluid, lyrical sequences, the vital roles of migration, dislocation, and exile in America's literary and intellectual genealogy get restored.
