NY: Doubleday & Company, 1969. First edition. 184pp. 8vo. Black cloth; orange spine titles; dust jacket, featuring design by Saul Lambert. Some fraying to cloth at base of spine. Light bumping top corners. Very good in a very good, unclipped ("$4.95") jacket with wear and slight loss at spine ends and tips, a white paint stain to spine panel. Inscribed by Disch on the front endpaper: "For Kenward - Verily, nearly, as you say - "Assiduous suffering." Thank-you's & compliments, Tom Disch."
First American edition of Disch's celebrated New Wave science fiction novel, a dystopic riff on the Faust legend and imperialistic American military policy; as inscribed by him to New York School poet, librettist, and publisher Kenward Elmslie (1929-2022). Disch, a poet as well as a novelist, was an active participant in the New York poetry scene, his work represented in Adventures in Poetry and other contemporary journals; he and Elmslie surely had a more than passing social relationship. The quotation in Disch's inscription repeats a line from Elmslie's book-length poem The Champ (Black Sparrow Press, 1968). In 1971, Disch was to include a chapter from Elmslie's novel-in-progress, The Orchid Stories, in his anthology of speculative fiction, The Ruins of Earth.
