Late Arcade - Nathaniel Mackey

Nathaniel Mackey might be best known as a poet—he’s won the National Book Award and received a Library of Congress lifetime achievement honor—but his most idiosyncratic work is an ongoing fiction series tracing the development of a California space-jazz group. This latest volume—a perfect introduction—is a beautiful thing, from its intricate epistolary structure to Mackey’s overwhelming language, which takes you deep inside the sounds of the instruments and the minds that make them sing. Tracking the group in microscopic, romantic, even surreal detail—from gig to gig, from idea to idea—gives you a novel unafraid to ask big questions of how artists relate to their art once it enters the audience’s lives.