Watch Baron read from The Road Washes Out in the Spring and discuss living off the grid on Poets Theater.
AVAILABLE NOW: Songs from a Voice: Being the Recollections, Stanzas and Observations of Abe Runyan, Song Writer and Performer
Baron
Wormser’s eighteenth book is a genre-bending novel that explores
creativity through poetry, prose, American music history, and the
unique voice of protagonist Abe Runyan. Wormser’s novel is a master
class on writing that explicates and engages the vast circumstances of
an imagination.
Order the book here Read the press release here Watch an interview with Baron here
"This lyrical and dramatic meditation on popular music, culture, and individuality in post-World War II America could be titled Chronicles, Volume Two: a Bob Dylan Story by Baron Wormser and nobody would blink. Abe Runyan, an invented character, is an amazing narrator; it's as if Greil Marcus, Bob Dylan, Baron Wormser, and an assortment of Delta blues musicians gathered together, had a few drinks, and told the collective story of who we are and how we got here, of imagination and mortality and all the tunes that keep us going when haunted by the endless highways and ticking clocks in America. It's a wonderful novel, a tour de force that's as penetrating and powerful as any of Bob Dylan's best songs. --Alan Davis, co-editor of Visiting Bob: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Bob Dylan
"Baron Wormser's brave novel Songs from a Voice should join Todd Haynes's film I'm Not There, Michael Gray's monumental Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, and Dylan's Chronicles, Volume One in the canon of works-inspired-by-and-(mostly)about-Dylan. It reads like Theme Time Radio Hour with quatrains taking the place of songs and terrific lists abounding. Narrator Abe Runyon riffs on and fills out Dylan's Hibbing and Greenwich Village years in a voice that sounds hauntingly similar to present-day Bob. Along the way, snakes speak in rhyme and roads teach about time. It's the best kind of fan fiction: a labor of love that moves beyond its inspiration to touch upon America, music, poetry, and why art matters." -- David Gaines, Author of In Dylan Town: A Fan's Life
“Baron
Wormser puts lives on paper in a way I’ve never seen before. . . . Here
he is, as Miles Davis exhaling an aching, grief-stricken riff or Willem
de Kooning discovering America or, one summer afternoon walking down
Broadway, Hannah Arendt. Some of these biographical essays read like a
soliloquy, others like a scenefrom a film in which the setting is a
mind rendered like a strange yet familiar landscape. There are so many
insights about the human
imagination that I was left wondering what I’ve been doing all my life. So much has escaped me.”
—Deborah Baker, author of The Convert: A Tale of
Exile and Extremism
Legends
of the Slow Explosion is now available through Tupelo Press.
Click here for more
information, or order the book here.
“In
Tom o’Vietnam, Baron Wormser has created a stunning literary mash-up of
a soldier’s fractured survival co-mingled with Shakespeare’s King Lear.
This commanding narrative explores the pilgrimage of a young veteran
who roams America as if it will lead him to King Lear’s plains of
Dover. Mired in ‘the poetry of incomprehension,’ Tom wanders in a helix
spun with the intricacies of words and the spaces between them,
grappling with the tragedy of Lear to find his way. I was thoroughly
engaged in this richly layered story and was equally rewarded to
witness a tenderness of love that underscores Tom’s odyssey, and the
surprise of my own emotions overcome with a rare kind of love for this
character and this book.”
—Eugenia Kim, author of The
Calligrapher’s Daugher
“Baron
Wormser puts lives on paper in a way I’ve never seen before. . . . Here
he is, as Miles Davis exhaling an aching, grief-stricken riff or Willem
de Kooning discovering America or, one summer afternoon walking down
Broadway, Hannah Arendt. Some of these biographical essays read like a
soliloquy, others like a scenefrom a film in which the setting is a
mind rendered like a strange yet familiar landscape. There are so many
insights about the human
“In
Tom o’Vietnam, Baron Wormser has created a stunning literary mash-up of
a soldier’s fractured survival co-mingled with Shakespeare’s King Lear.
This commanding narrative explores the pilgrimage of a young veteran
who roams America as if it will lead him to King Lear’s plains of
Dover. Mired in ‘the poetry of incomprehension,’ Tom wanders in a helix
spun with the intricacies of words and the spaces between them,
grappling with the tragedy of Lear to find his way. I was thoroughly
engaged in this richly layered story and was equally rewarded to
witness a tenderness of love that underscores Tom’s odyssey, and the
surprise of my own emotions overcome with a rare kind of love for this
character and this book.”