Wings Press

Bracing, chastening, furiously intelligent, Alex Stein's aphoristic essays should be required reading for anyone embarking on a literary career. "The quicker you come to the point," he writes, "the sooner it unravels." Yet his meditations on life and reading are durable work. Like Cyril Connolly's The Unquiet Grave and the prose of W. H. Auden, they will blow the dust off your thinking and provide hours of challenging pleasure.

In this remarkable book, Stein moves through a progression of carefully shaped observations and vignettes to turn fragments of thought and experience into a living whole. Beautifully written yet subtly subversive, this book is a powerful, canny, and refreshing combination of insight, wit, and deep humanity.

To attempt to sum up Alex Stein's visionary compilation of essays and aphorisms would be a quixotic endeavor at best, which in fact provides a fit allusion because, like the melancholy knight, Alex Stein is not afraid to tilt with the giants of philosophy, culture and literature, at times exposing them as mere windmills, other times championing their power to ravish. Like the best of Pessoa, Alex Stein's writing proves that the poet philosopher is alive and well. Mr. Stein has drawn the sword of his wit, and it is razor sharp.

Bracing, chastening, furiously intelligent, Alex Stein's aphoristic essays should be required reading for anyone embarking on a literary career. "The quicker you come to the point," he writes, "the sooner it unravels." Yet his meditations on life and reading are durable work. Like Cyril Connolly's The Unquiet Grave and the prose of W. H. Auden, they will blow the dust off your thinking and provide hours of challenging pleasure. --David Mason, author of The Buried Houses (Roerich Poetry Prize), et al. Editor of Twentieth Century American Poetry and Twentieth Century American Poetics: Poets on the Art of Poetry and other works.

In this remarkable book, Stein moves through a progression of carefully shaped observations and vignettes to turn fragments of thought and experience into a living whole. Beautifully written yet subtly subversive, this book is a powerful, canny, and refreshing combination of insight, wit, and deep humanity. -- Kristen Iversen, Associate Professor, The University of Memphis Editor-in-Chief, The Pinch

To attempt to sum up Alex Stein's visionary compilation of essays and aphorisms would be a quixotic endeavor at best, which in fact provides a fit allusion because, like the melancholy knight, Alex Stein is not afraid to tilt with the giants of philosophy, culture and literature, at times exposing them as mere windmills, other times championing their power to ravish. Like the best of Pessoa, Alex Stein's writing proves that the poet philosopher is alive and well. Mr. Stein has drawn the sword of his wit, and it is razor sharp. --Peter Grandbois, author of The Gravedigger