OR

Kindle Price:	$8.99
Sold by:	Amazon.com Services LLC

Promotions apply when you purchase

Read with our free app

You've subscribed to ! We will preorder your items within 24 hours of when they become available. When new books are released, we'll charge your default payment method for the lowest price available during the pre-order period.

Update your device or payment method, cancel individual pre-orders or your subscription at
Your Memberships & Subscriptions

There was an error. We were unable to process your subscription due to an error. Please refresh and try again.

Follow the author

Richard Peabody

+ Follow

More books from this author

The Richard Peabody Reader (Legacy Series) Kindle Edition

by Richard Peabody (Author), Michael Dirda (Author, Introduction), Lucinda Ebersole (Editor) Format: Kindle Edition

5.0 10 ratings

See all formats and editions

Filling an important gap in the literary world, The Richard Peabody Reader is a wide-ranging selection of this great writer's poetry and prose. As a publisher, Peabody's steadfast dedication to that which is new, challenging, innovative, and dynamic has won him a wide reputation among writers whose work he has championed. This volume demonstrates those same values, embodied in nearly four decades of fiercely smart, sophisticated, and often very funny writing. From his first collection of poems, I'm in Love with the Morton Salt Girl, to his most recent collection of short stories, Blue Suburban Skies, Peabody has established and developed a thoroughly unique voice, both warm and piercing, to deliver content that ranges from the hilarious, as in the short story "Flea Wars," to the bittersweet, as in the poem "The Other Man is Always French," to the elegiac, as in the poem in "Civil War Pieta," to the absurd, as in the rollicking farce of the short story, "Bad Day at Ikea." Peabody's aesthetic is all-embracing—strands of punk, beat, experimental, feminist, and political protest literary influences blend with the purely romantic to create a body of work that is both profound and pleasing.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"This is a top-notch production . . . terrific and eclectic." —Nathan Leslie, the Pedestal magazine

"The life work of this proud, bitter, principled, generous man and the immeasurable service he has done on behalf of literature command respect and deserve attention." —Michael Lindgren, the Washington Post

"Peabody shows it all here, tragedy, humor, joy,wit, and compassion, and speaks for a generation of adults who are still trying to figure it out in our age of decadence." —Scott Whitaker, the Broadkill Review

About the Author

Richard Peabody is the founder and current editor of Gargoyle Magazine, now on its 61st issue, and editor (or co-editor) of twenty-two anthologies including Mondo Barbie, Conversations with Gore Vidal, and A Different Beat: Writings by Women of the Beat Generation. The author of a novella, three short story collections, and seven books of poetry. A native Washingtonian, he has taught fiction writing workshops at various locations in the DC area since 1985, though primarily for the Johns Hopkins Advanced Studies Program since 1995 where he was awarded The Johns Hopkins University Excellence in Teaching Award, 2010-2011, and the Faculty Award for Outstanding Professional Achievement (Master of Arts in Writing Program), 2005. He has held residencies at Blue Mountain Center, Byrdcliffe, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. He also won the Beyond the Margins “Above & Beyond Award” for 2013. Lucinda Ebersole is a critic, an editor, and a fiction writer best known for her association with the literary journal Gargoyle Magazine, for which she has been coeditor along with Richard Peabody since 1997. She has also edited various anthologies with Peabody, most notably the various books in their Mondo series. Michael Dirda is a Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist for the Washington Post Book World and the author of the memoir An Open Book and four collections of essays: Book by Book, Bound to Please, Classics for Pleasure, and Readings. They all live in Washington, DC.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00TCZTH1W
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Santa Fe Writer's Project (April 1, 2015)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ April 1, 2015
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 4225 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 474 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #3,311,956 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #2,701 in United States Literary Criticism
- #3,544 in American Literature Anthologies
- #6,029 in American Poetry (Kindle Store)

Customer Reviews:
5.0 10 ratings

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Videos

Help others learn more about this product by uploading a video!

Upload your video

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Richard Peabody

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Just wanted to mention that there are a few spoken word/music Gargoyle CDs on Amazon as well. Gargoyle #46, #49, #52, #63, and #69. You'll find them in Music.

Customer reviews

5 out of 5

10 global ratings

5 star

100%

4 star

0%

3 star

0%

2 star

0%

1 star

0%

How customer reviews and ratings work

Sort reviews by

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Susan Tepper

Been Reading This Book Every Night

Reviewed in the United States on March 12, 2015

Verified Purchase

For starters, this is a beautiful book to look at and hold. It has the ragged-edge pages which you hardly get these days in books and gives this book a timeless quality. The photos alone would make a great book, they are filled with the writer's history in terms of being a writer and publisher. And lover of the written word. Some people are enamored of the written word. Richard Peabody for one-- his range of work here is extensive and expansive. He writes straight without using elevated language. He gets in, tells his story or poem, and knows when it's time to get out. That, for a writer, is gold. I've been reading this book every night. Its cover and coloration makes me want to read it when there is darkness outside. This is just my own personal quirky thing. I attach to books and people in specific ways. I'm attached to this book and happy Richard Peabody decided to write it. Most highly recommended.

3 people found this helpful

Helpful

Elle

I loved this book and will miss it now that I've finished it...

Reviewed in the United States on June 25, 2018

Verified Purchase

It's been years since I've read something as worthwhile as this collection of stories, poems, and essays by Richard Peabody. Each poem and story generates its own gravitational field of meaning, providing a welcome OtherWorld of characters, plots (some of them quite unusual) and an honest depiction of human vulnerabilities. In Peabody's stories magical reality abounds in the mundane; ordinary people have extraordinary longings. This volume has been my companion for the past three weeks. After such a generous, finely crafted serving of exquisite poetry and fiction, I will miss very much opening up this book each day and diving into its riveting, tender, funny, and authentic humanness.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Yarokit

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United States on March 7, 2015

Verified Purchase

A treasure to savor, already dipped into many delights in this lovely volume.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

S. Scott Whitaker

From the Broadkill Review

Reviewed in the United States on December 13, 2015

The Richard Peabody Reader was a great cabin fever read this winter; the anthology gracefully covers Peabody’s range, depth, and humor. The Reader, compiled by Lucinda Ebersole is a mix tape of greatest hits from the Washington writer’s long career. Peabody is also a publisher of writers, the founder of Gargoyle literary magazine and Paycock Press, and organizer of regional readings and events. Along the way Peabody befriended Jamie Brown, the Broadkill’s editor, which is to say, dear reader, how I came to Facebook with Peabody, and this winter read and review his work. Full disclosure: I don’t know the man personally, but have a social media friendship with him, a smendship if you will. I reviewed his short fiction for the BKR some years ago, so the work within the collection was more or less all new for me. It’s a weekend of deep cuts, the collection is, a great reveal of humanity’s follies. The poetry collected here is the easy-peasy-lemo- squeezy free verse style that novelist and fiction writers do so well. That’s not a diss, either. Think Raymond Carver. Simple, direct, no fuss to it all; graceful and direct, but something verse-heads and formalists might dismiss as prosey. Consider “Good Hope Road” from the Read & Writing section, “his sharp features//like kudzu swallows Carolina red clay, “ or the opening line to “Folding Laundry in My Dreams” where Peabody speaks for almost every spouse or partner in any relationship when he says “I could fold laundry every day/for one thousand years/and never satisfy the women in my life.”

Peabody’s short fiction is a delight. Nothing’s too long for the commute (save for maybe “Sugar Mountain, a triptych”--which if you are fan of Neil Young is a delight to read), and Peabody nails suburban boredom, the kind that spirals into affairs, overblown pride, addiction and human stupidity. Peabody embraces violence, in the uber creepy “Peppermint Schnapps” a sleazy car salesman gets his just desserts, when a vengeful father and widow murders him out of long buried resentments surrounding his daughter’s pregnancy and suicide.

Family lies at the heart of Peabody’s work, those tangled, sticky, often unwanted relationships we nurture, starve, and nurture again, often leaving the reader on the emotional hook. That’s the beauty about short fiction, the reader gets one ending, but not the whole story. In “Walking on Gilded Splinters” it is only via the threats of a once homeless woman that drive the anti-hero back to his wife and family, and we feel that the marriage will fail, we almost want it too, because Wilson can’t control his libido or his ego, but we don’t get the luxury of finding out. Likewise in “Dresden for Cats” Uncle March is such an interesting personality, building cities for cats on his farm, allowing his cats to compose music, that we aren’t expecting his wife to turn up nuts, to turn the narrative upside down and end with a destroyed farm and stunned narrator, “You can pour all your love into somebody who’s mentally ill but they are big black holes, and you’ll never have enough love.”

The collection is gathered into sections; the thematic organizations allows for readers to experience Peabody of varying ages in each grouping; in a manner of speaking the reader can experience Peabody’s growth and breadth as a short fiction writer and poet in nearly every section. And what strikes me is his consistency as a writer, from his chosen subject matter to the clean line. I also love the pop culture references, which many writers cannot do well. Peabody’s up there with Stephen King, and Nick Hornby; who write about how movies, television, and music, especially music, affect our lives, and affect our reading of the story. Peabody knows when he conjures up, say The Grateful Dead, or Neil Young, or Nick Cave, that fans of the music will bring with them trunk loads of associations that enlarge the emotional narrative. Music and pop culture are as important as the time and place of the setting; cue-cards for the characters who often struggle to maneuver through the both the emotional and temporal setting of the story.

Peabody shows it all here, tragedy, humor, joy, wit, and irony, and speaks for a generation of adults who are still trying to figure it out in our age of decadence.

2 people found this helpful

Helpful

Moral Pomp

Peabody Reader is a grand, grueling, and rewarding read

Reviewed in the United States on August 10, 2018

The Peabody Reader is wild. It's a genuine compendium of the best work by Peabody with all the hits and then some. I especially liked the long-form stories like flea wars and lost in IKEA. It's crazy this man isn't a mainstream success but he's beloved in the subterranean. Peabody is D.C. Lit. If you live in or around D.C. And live literature, then this is the gospel according to Lucinda Ebersole, the selected writings of a messianic figure. His poems are hit or miss I've found, some really get to you, some punctuate with a joke, some, like "im in love with the Morton salt girl" pretend to joke but burn with energy and meaning between the lines.

Bottom line: if you like good literature but don't know Peabody, you'll dig the reader--it's a great place to start. If you like Peabody, this is essential.

Helpful

Caroline Bock

A DISCOVERY! Moving poetry and short story collection

Reviewed in the United States on November 6, 2015

I discovered Richard Peabody and his writing through his literary magazine GARGOYLE. The poetry and stories are moving, about fathers and husbands and lovers who care deeply about their families and the world, and are worth sharing.

Helpful

M

Richard Peabody has long known excellent writing--because he's published it as the editor of GARGOYLE

Reviewed in the United States on March 12, 2015

Richard Peabody has long known excellent writing--because he's published it as the editor of GARGOYLE, sure, but also because he's written it. Have been waiting for such a volume for quite a while. Plenty in here many will enjoy.

Reviewed in the United States on August 30, 2020

Verified Purchase

Peabody is such a terrific writer. I wish more people would discover him.

Helpful