MAX PORTER (b.1981)
Grief is the Thing with Feathers. London: Faber & Faber, 2015.
First edition, copiously annotated and illustrated by the author with over 1600 words of commentary. Grief is the Thing with Feathers is Max Porter’s stunning and genre-defying debut work—part poetry, part prose, ‘part novella, part polyphonic fable, part essay on grief’. Taking flight from Emily Dickinson and Ted Hughes, it concerns a recently bereaved husband, his two motherless young boys, and the extraordinary appearance of Crow in their time of grief. Porter’s interventions and additions in this first edition are dazzling. They include two leaves of autograph manuscript from the original notebooks for this work pasted onto the rear endpapers, illustrations to 14 pages including a full-page black pen and ink illustration of a crow on the title page, and a further 19 objects pasted in including 8 small black card feathers, an alternative to the original dust jacket artwork, and promotional material relating to productions of the stage play. The author’s annotations appear on almost every page of the book and relate to the literary influences that shaped him (‘This page shows what I’m made of […] I’m made of what I’ve read’), his writing process (‘I always start writing by drawing’), his thoughts about criticism (‘Critics will wilfully misunderstand things’) and setbacks (‘Someone told me to “go away and write a proper book”), being translated into other languages and adapted for the stage, and his own personal experiences of grief.

Octavo. Original grey boards, black lettering to spine, pictorial dust jacket (part-title for Part One largely replaced by a leaf of promotional material for the German version of the stage play).

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