Philip Schultz - Böcker

"One of the strongest literary renditions of the Shoah I know."-Saul Friedlander, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Years of Extermination

Despite winning the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2008, Philip Schultz could never shake the feeling of being exiled to the "dummy class" in school, where he was largely ignored by his teachers and peers and not expected to succeed. Not until many years later, when his oldest son was diagnosed with dyslexia, did Schultz realize that he suffered from the same condition.In his moving memoir, Schultz traces his difficult childhood and his new understanding of his early years. In doing so, he shows how a boy who did not learn to read until he was eleven went on to become a prize-winning poet by sheer force of determination. His balancing act—life as a member of a family with not one but two dyslexics, countered by his intellectual and creative successes as a writer—reveals an inspiring story of the strengths of the human mind.

This astonishing novel in verse tells the story of a haunted young man hiding from the Vietnam War in the basement of a San Francisco building and translating his mother’s diaries. The diaries concern the Jedwabne massacre that took place in Poland in 1941. Wildly inventive, dark, beautiful and unrelenting, The Wherewithal is a meditation on the nature of evil and the destruction of war.

“...[R]eplete with insights and nuggets of wisdom” (The Washington Post), Philip Schultz’s wry and incisive poetic voice takes on both the eternal questions of meaning and happiness and essentially modern complexities. At once philosophical and droll, he explores life’s luxuries and challenges with masterly precision.

Throughout his growth as a writer, acclaimed poet Philip Schultz has battled with the dark voice in his head—the “shitbird,” as his late friend the poet Ralph Dickey termed it—that whispers his insecurities and questions his ability to create. Persona writing, a method of borrowing the voice and temperament of accomplished writers, offers him imaginative distance and perspective on his own negative inclinations.In this candid and generous book, Schultz reflects on his early life in an immigrant neighborhood of upstate New York, his first writing experiments inspired by Ernest Hemingway and John Keats, his struggles with dyslexia, and the failures he witnessed in his father’s life and his own. Through surprising, sometimes humorous, and encouraging encounters with the writers who influence him—including Elizabeth Bishop, Joan Didion, and Norman Mailer—as well as moving experiences of loss, Schultz learns how to fashion personas out of pain.Perceptive, enlightening, and profound, Comforts of the Abyss reveals how persona writing can be used as a tool for unlocking a writer’s own story, the philosophy on which Schultz founded The Writers Studio in 1987.

Throughout his growth as a writer, acclaimed poet Philip Schultz has battled with the dark voice in his head—the “shitbird,” as his late friend the poet Ralph Dickey termed it—that whispers his insecurities and questions his ability to create. Persona writing, a method of borrowing the voice and temperament of accomplished writers, offers him imaginative distance and perspective on his own negative inclinations.In this candid and generous book, Schultz reflects on his early life in an immigrant neighborhood of upstate New York, his first writing experiments inspired by Ernest Hemingway and John Keats, his struggles with dyslexia, and the failures he witnessed in his father’s life and his own. Through surprising, sometimes humorous, and encouraging encounters with the writers who influence him—including Elizabeth Bishop, Joan Didion, and Norman Mailer—as well as moving experiences of loss, Schultz learns how to fashion personas out of pain.Perceptive, enlightening, and profound, Comforts of the Abyss reveals how persona writing can be used as a tool for unlocking a writer’s own story, the philosophy on which Schultz founded The Writers Studio in 1987.

Philip Schultz is famous for his empathetic explorations of male shortcomings, primarily those of his late father. Enormous Morning, his incisive new volume, reflects on the sacrifices of women in their roles as mothers, wives and friends, including those of his own mother, who was forced to support the family in the face of his father’s financial ruin. The collection ends with a long poem, “Something and Nothing,” that pays homage to the Arshile Gorky painting The Artist and His Mother.But the poems are also political in scope. Schultz weaves these personal stories into the broader tapestry of our political moment, reflecting on the fragility of democracy, including the January 6 insurrection, and those who are willing to sacrifice themselves to preserve it. Intimate, vulnerable and inviting, Enormous Morning cements Schultz as our greatest chronicler of compassion.Philip Schultz’s Luxury was praised as:“Compelling… [Schultz’s] works are replete with insights and nuggets of wisdom.” — The Washington Post