"For fourty years this writing has kept me company. All I do is try to accompany it, in turn. You, too, will be left irreparably and rapturously unalone." —Fred MotenFrom a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate explores music, philosophy, myth, erotics, and sociality in a rich and innovative patchwork of dreams, discourse, and everyday life. Mackey’s epic quintet is an epistolary novel that unfolds through N.’s intimate letters to the mysterious Angel of Dust. Unexpected events and profound happenings occur as N. delves into the goings-on of his transmorphic Los Angeles-based jazz ensemble, in which he is a composer and multi-instrumentalist. The story opens in July 1978 with a dream of a haunting Archie Shepp solo and a disassembled bass clarinet, and closes in June 1984 with a disconcertingly positive review of the ensemble’s first album Orphic Bend. Unlike anything written today, From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate collects the full five installments—Bedouin Hornbook, Djbot Baghostus’s Run, Atet A.D., Bass Cathedral, and Late Arcade—of Nathaniel Mackey’s genre-defying work of serial fiction, which layers realism and myth through jazz-infused prose.
