Late Arcade

Late Arcade

<p><strong><strong>A new volume of the singular, ongoing, great American jazz novel </strong></strong></p><p>Nathaniel Mackey’s <em>Late Arcade</em> opens in Los Angeles. A musician known only as N. writes the first of a series of letters to the enigmatic Angel of Dust. N.’s jazz sextet, Molimo m’Atet, has just rehearsed a new tune: the horn players read from <em>The Egyptian Book of the Dead</em> with lips clothespinned shut, while the rest of the band struts and saunters in a cosmic hymn to the sun god Ra. N. ends this breathless session by sending the Angel of Dust a cassette tape of their rehearsal.</p><p>Over the next nine months, N.’s epistolary narration follows the musical goings-on of the ensemble. N. suffers from what he calls “cowrie shell at- tacks”―oil spills, N.’s memory of his mother’s melancholy musical Sundays― which all becomes the source of fresh artistic invention.</p><p>Here is the newest installment of the National Book Award-winner Nathaniel Mackey’s <em>From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate</em>, the great American jazz novel of “exquisite rhythmic lyricism” (<em>Bookforum</em>). </p>