Terra Nova Press

W. A. Mathieu

A renowned musician in his 85th year explores the nature of wisdom, how we learn to recognize it, and how we pass it forward.

In this entrancing memoir, timeless questions about music and life are explored by a master musician in his 85th year. The stern father who built an empire of words; the solipsistic uncle whose hypnotic voice calmed millions: these are just early glimpses of Mathieu’s memory. Soon he is crimped into an overhead baggage rack in Stan Kenton’s tour bus as scenes of scotch-soaked melancholy play out below; he is sharing late-night quarts of ice cream with Duke Ellington in his hotel room; he is co-inventing improvisational theater at Chicago’s Second City with Alan Arkin and Mike Nichols; he is receiving the title of Sufi sheikh from an heir of Inayat Khan; and he is gleaning wisdom from a woman bundling firewood in Bali.

In prose at once wry and lyrical, Mathieu carries the reader through the adventures and misadventures of a scintillating and deeply examined life.

William Allaudin Mathieu, a classically trained pianist, composed and arranged on the staff of the Stan Kenton Orchestra at age 21 and was a co-founding member of the Second City Theater at 22. He studied with William Russo, Easley Blackwood, Pandit Pran Nath, and Hamza El Din and taught on the full-time faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and Mills College. A former columnist for Downbeat and Piano Today, he is the author of five books, including The Listening Book and Harmonic Experience, and has released over thirty albums comprising an astonishing range of music.

memoir April | 5 1/2 x 8 1/4, 320 pp. | 15 illus.

US $27.95T/$36.95 CAN paper

978-1-949597-29-5 Distributed for Terra Nova Press Geoffrey O’Brien

A genre-bending novel of 1001 nights of no-holdsbarred, pre-code American movies distilled into a single fevered dreamworld.

Arabian Nights of 1934 is a journey through the fevered dreamworld embodied in American movies of the early 1930s: an era that closed abruptly with the enforcement of the Production Code in July 1934. It distills a thousand and one nights of Depression-era movie-going—plotlines, closeups, cityscapes, wisecracks, backchat, and frantic outbursts—into a haunting parallel life, the stories bleeding into one another as they did in the minds of the viewers whom they helped sustain. Two of those viewers, it so happens, are O’Brien’s own parents in their restless youth—one impatient to experience the world beyond the screen, one ready to take it on—and the glimpse we’re afforded into the darkened theaters of their minds frames the book with an act of imagination at once tender and audacious.

Geoffrey O’Brien is a widely published poet, critic, and cultural historian whose books include Hardboiled America (1981), Dream Time (1988), The Phantom Empire (1993), The Times Square Story (1998), The Browser’s Ecstasy (2000), Sonata for Jukeboxes (2004), and Where Did Poetry Come From: Some Early Encounters (2020). He has published nine collections of poetry, most recently The Blue Hill (Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize, 2018) and Who Goes There (2020). He was for many years editor in chief of The Library of America, and contributes frequently to The New York Review of Books, Bookforum, Artforum, Film Comment, and other periodicals. He lives in Brooklyn.

fiction April | 5 1/2 x 8 1/4, 240 pp. | 20 illus.

US $24.95T/$33.95 CAN paper

978-1-949597-27-1 Distributed for Terra Nova Press

128 Spring 2023 | mitpress.mit.edu