North Of Yesterday

North of Yesterday is written in a fluid mixture of prose and verse. It incorporates classical meters and narration, and systematically interweaves the Orpheus myth with a contemporary situation: the story of a death by heroin overdose. Love, guilt, desire and degradation are paired in the stories of Della and Wally, and then again in those of Vincent and Waz, and made poignant mockery by a mad poet, Quintus of Smyrna. This is a bizarre epic of Everyman, a challenging prose invention with few antecedents: North of Yesterday joins that great tradition of sardonic, black-hearted comedies extending from Lautreamont's Maldoror and Huysman's Against Nature, to Hedayat's The Blind Owl and the late works of William Burroughs.

"There are passages of demented fustian grandeur that read like the nightmares of the great gothic maniacs like Poe, Rimbaud, Lautremont and Baudelaire. And others that remind you of the great surrealists of this century — Burroughs, Celine, Patchen, Artaud." — City Paper (Baltimore)

"McEvilley has created a book that is a dream, a dream that is a book, and the reader who enters its pages does so by surrendering the conventional comfort afforded by reliance on a linear exposition of reality. . . . Alternately erotic and obscene, gorgeous and empurpled, North of Yesterday may remind some of the fiction of John Hawkes; in any event, its achievement will doubtless be taken by some as a truly remarkable one that amply rewards the investment of attention it demands." — Choice