Author and Washington College Professor Emeritus Robert Day will introduce his new novel, Let Us Imagine Lost Love, at the Book Plate bookstore, 6 pm Friday. The public is invited to this free event.
Robert Day’s novel The Last Cattle Drive was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. His short fiction has won a number of awards and citations, including two Seaton Prizes, a Pen Faulkner/NEA prize, and Best American Short Story and Pushcart citations. His fiction has been published by Tri-Quarterly, Black Warrior Review, Kansas Quarterly, North Dakota Quarterly, and New Letters among other belles-lettres magazines. He is the author of two novellas, In My Stead and The Four Wheel Drive Quartet, as well as three collections of short fiction: Speaking French in Kansas, Where I Am Now, and The Billion Dollar Dream . His nonfiction has been published in the Washington Post Magazine, Smithsonian Magazine, Forbes FYI, Modern Maturity, World Literature Today, American Scholar, and Numero Cinq. As a member of the Prairie Writers Circle his essays have been reprinted in numerous newspapers and journals nationwide, and on such internet sites as Counterpunch.
Another book, Robert Day for President: an Embellished Campaign Autobiography is set for publication in the Spring of 2016.
Day, a former professor of English Literature and Creative Writing at Washington College was the founder of the Literary House in the early 1970s. Under his directorship, the several incarnations the Literary House found a permanent location as the Rose O’Neill Literary House on Washington Avenue. To read a collection of memories of the early Lit House Days written by WC alumni, go here.
During his three-decade tenure, Day brought many top-tier authors to the College including William Styron, Allen Ginsberg and Jonathon Franzen, and Toni Morrison just to name a few. He also founded the Literary House Press, an imprint both for letterpress limited edition printing and traditional book publishing.
A recent publisher’s press release offers a synopsis of his new book:
“Robert Day’s novel Let Us Imagine Lost Love has the motif of modest erudition. It is a good book for people who read good books. Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti make cameo appearances, but so do Jackson Pollack, Virgil Thompson, Anton Chekhov, William Holden, Walker Percy, Doc Brinkley (most people probably don’t know about Doc Brinkley), Mrs. Bridge, Calvin Trillin, William Allen White, Dustin Hoffman—well, you get the idea. The No Name Bar in Sausalito, California shows up as a Mecca for the main characters.
The narrator (a man not yet of a certain age—think of Joyce Cary’s Gulley Jimson—he does) designs books at his posh Kansas City apartment in between his Wednesday assignations, his studies of indigent patients at the local Medical School, and gazing at his sight-bite appearance in The Graduate that is freeze-framed on his plasma television. The novel is set on the Kansas City Plaza in the present, in Berkeley, California in the past.
It is Berkeley that provides the watermark for the story. Beth Brookings, a would-be lover from those days (they have not met for more than thirty years), has become a celebrated painter and an exhibition of her work is about to arrive in Kansas City. Unknown to Ms. Brookings, the narrator has designed a number of publications connected with the show, including the book that is Let Us Imagine Lost Love. As the novel moves toward its denouement (it’s that kind of story; it has that kind of ending), the two lovers close the gap between the past and the present.
There are a plethora (his mother uses such words at a three-a-day rate) of other characters and episodes: A sister who is our narrator’s confidante; a college roommate who becomes a homeless bum living in the creek that runs through the Plaza (he thinks he’s the clock in Ionesco’s Bald Soprano); a California friend who becomes a famous doctor; an uncle who was a famous doctor; a ditzy aunt who bounces her 1960’s Cadillac through the Berkeley Hills; a father who sits in a webbed aluminum lawn beside a glass globe in the front yard talking to himself.
More: A heart lung machine that blows up a dog. Early phone sex. The House un-American Activities Committee. The birth of Ta-Bid as a world religion. Mantras: “Hang up Medicine, unless it can prove a Juliet.” “Nothing is lost, everything changes.” And a John the Baptist Walking, Talking Teaching Doll (this is where Doc Brinkley comes in). Plus Art Book Alice, Red Boa Rachel, and Stripper Suzie as married Wednesday wives.Walking, Talking Teaching Doll (this is where Doc Brinkley comes in). Plus Art Book Alice, Red Boa Rachel, and Stripper Suzie as married Wednesday wives.”
Walter Cummins at Serving House Press, publishers of Day’s Chance Encounters of a Literary Kind, writes. “Bob Day’s writing has the personal appeal of a conversation with a witty and perceptive friend. His voice is very engaging, and his stories about the writers he knows memorable. I’ve been eager to share them with others. Making these memoirs available as a book fulfilled that goal.”
“People die and memories fade, so it’s good to remember your living moments, as Bob Day does. Who wants to write obituaries? His swift sketches of meeting and hanging out with fellow writers or just fellow humans preserve the warmth of the occasions and their times. Lucky aliens who find this capsule.” —Andrei Codrescu, author of So Recently Rent a World: New and Selected Poems.
Please join Robert Day for a festive reading and hors d’oeuvres at the Book Plate this Friday.
Let Us Imagine Lost Love is published by Thane and Prose Editorial Agency in New York City. To see a video interview with the publisher, go here.
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