Date: Tue, 21 Nov 95 12:47:12 -0500
From: rharris@epfl1.epflbalto.org (Reginald Harris 396-0295 PNN)

	For those of you who want to order the book, here's a complete citation you 
can give to your favorite bookseller.

	Keene, John.  _Annotations_. 
Publisher: New Directions
ISBN: (they will need this to order it!)  0-81112-1304-8

FYI -- It's $8.95, 96pgs. Paperback  and was released on the 26th of October.

I ordered mine from Lambda Rising, Balto.  and haven't heard from them yet.  I 
think I'll put some fire under 'em today.

                      Publishers Weekly, 

September 4, 1995 

HEADLINE: Annotations. xbook reviews 

BODY:  John Keene.  New Directions, $ 8.95 (96p) ISBN 0-8812-1304-8 

"Thus his musings, when written down, gradually melded, gathered shape,
solidified like a well-mixed mache, and thus, upon rereading them he
realized what he had accomplished was the construction of an actual voice.
The final dances of youth, dim incandescence." Newcomer Keene has written
a dense, lyrically beautiful and highly experimental debut. Composed of
short passages open to multiple interpretations, it defies easy
description.  Annotations could be described as a bildungsroman, as a
collection of short recits by unnamed and undetermined narrators, an elegy
to the rise and fall of Keene's native St. Louis, a meditation on the
African American influence there and much,much more. It may sound
daunting, but Keene's masterful prose smoothly transgresses traditional
lines of representation and description without ever seeming like an
exercise in multi-thematic chaos. Keene's ambitious attempts to convey
subtle beauty and complex emotions through obscure allusions
occasionallybeg for more extensive explanation than that provided by the
notes at the end ofthe text. Still, Annotations is a work that should not
be ignored and is worthy of the highest recommendation. It is an
experimental work that pinpoints a new direction for literary fiction in
the 21st century. (Oct.)