Crepuscule W/Nellie

Joe Milazzo's debut novel Crepuscule W/Nellie explores, via imagined as well as reimagined circumstances and incidents, the relationships between jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk, his wife Nellie, and his patron and confidante, the Baroness Pannonica De Koenigswarter. "(Crepuscule W/Nellie is the first volume in the #RECURRENT novels series, edited by Janice Lee)"

"Milazzo dug this lost recording of the Monk/Monk/Pannonica trio-dug as in figured, as in got into, as in exhumed-out that 'dustbin' folks talk about. And since the composition called Crepescule W/Nellie is this time a story storying history, the good mess Milazzo so expertly messes with alchemizes the linguistic odds-and-ends that make a vernacular both high-falluting and low-down; the factual scraps that member a fiction into a rich speculation; and the individuals ignored so long they must come back to us in books. Our author has given us a fascinating one. Dig it, dig it, dig it." -Douglas Kearney, author of "The Black Automaton" and "PATTER 3"

"The challenge in writing on behalf of Joe Milazzo's fiction is finding the language to convey how special it is, but let us begin with audacious and fearless, lyrical and brilliant, superbly imaginative and assuredly accomplished-one of tomorrow's great novelists on the cusp of his moment." -Steve Erickson, Author of "Zeroville" and "Our Ecstatic Days"

..". A] bountifully generative crumbling-down. Crepuscule W/Nellie reminds vividly of Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, " where motion is a collapse that does nothing but give back form to that very motion." -Achraf A. El Bahi

"A polyvocal narrative that's part Faulkner a la midcentury Manhattan's jazz epicenters, part early 90's avant-pop crossed with Black Mountain poetics, and part ghost, Joe Milazzo's genrebending Crepuscule W/Nellie boldly re-imagines the relationship between fact and fiction." -Claire Donato, author of "Burial"

"Joe Milazzo's Crepuscule W/Nellie is a blast. So rarely do we get a novel this momentous, challenging, ambitious-Crepuscule W/Nellie transcends expectation. I'm moved by the fierce acuity of the maximalist prose, never less than adroit and vital as it parses a famous triangle between the maestro, Thelonious Monk, his wife Nellie, and the Bebop Baroness, Panonica de Koenigswarter, the most storied music patron of the 20th century. Triangulating the infinite personal declensions between struggling black musicians and the white patrons, between the women and their men, Joe Milazzo's language brilliantly echolocates that essentially American distance, sounding out an American loneliness that is with us still." -Sesshu Foster, author of "World Ball Notebook" and "Atomik Aztex"

"Joe Milazzo's Crepuscule W/Nellie takes as its great and original subject a care-giver's, literally home-maker's immensely improvising relation to a creative genius, a demanding, needy, powerful, enigmatic, often disappointing man who was her husband. That is what this long, intimate, painfully American, many-voiced rumination of a novel is about - though also, and indirectly, about much that is implied by its title, which was first that of Thelonious Monk's shortest major composition, one of my favorites, with its outer, measured clarity and inner, off-balance infinities and shadows. Has Milazzo added the lyrics? I think rather that he has written a deep, interior book about lives that included jazz and everything else. A book that will last. " -Joseph McElroy, author of "Cannonball" and "Women and Men""