Click any of Ivan Klein’s books below to buy them on Amazon:
The Long-Term Effects of Baseball and Other Diamond Tales
This small volume of stories and essays contains unique, deeply personal takes on baseball, its unfolding history and its lore. It’s also the record of a sometimes painful life journey, punctuated by the glory of the game and the poetry that it quickened. You’ll find grandstand reveries of picaresque adventures between West Africa and New York; close readings of Zane Grey’s surreal fictive ballgames; the baseball poems of Shiki and William Carlos Williams revisited; personal recollections of seeing Mickey Mantle, Sandy Koufax and other legends up close; and lastly, a poster of the 1955 World Champion Brooklyn Dodgers, a walk through the Jackie Robinson Museum, and the author’s efforts to come home to all of it. This book is an essential read for lovers of the literature of the game.
Toward Melville: Poems On the Life and Work of Herman Melville
This book is a voyage in revelatory prose and poetry into the life and work of Herman Melville, a giant of American and world literature. It offers unique poetic perspectives on the shattering death of his father when he was twelve, his sailor’s mystic reveries in the South Seas, his emergence as a famous young author, and the very difficult familial and artistic struggles that ensued. The great works Moby Dick, The Confidence Man, Bartleby, and Billy Budd, as well as the more obscure epic poem Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land and the neglected small prose masterpiece “Daniel Orme”, engender original creative responses that transcend biographical and literary genre. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the man and his work.
The Hat And Other Poems And Prose
The writing in The Hat And Other Poems And Prose — poems, essays, stories — addresses empty spaces, silences, and evasions of one kind or another. It seems to the author, in retrospect, that they were mostly written out of inner necessity, and he hopes that you will consider them given their crucial intentions.
Alternatives to Silence
This book will be available for purchase on Amazon soon.