A Nest of Ninnies [Hardcover]

John Ashbery (Author), James Schuyler (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1997

The insular tranquility of a group of suburban New Yorkers is shattered by two vivacious sisters from Paris in a comic novel about the pretensions of America's upper-middle-class by two of America's foremost poets."

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Destined to become a minor classic." --W. H. Auden

"Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about A Nest of Ninnies is that the two poets have dissolved their own personalities and merged so entirely into a common style that it can be said that the book's author is neither Ashbery nor Schuyler but a third entity fashioned in the process of collaboration." --David Lehman, The Last Avant-Garde

"The best comic novel I've read since Lolita." --F. W. Dupree --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

About the Author

American poets, playwrights, and novelists, both John Ashbery (b. 1927) and James Schuyler (1923-1991) are often associated with the New York school of poets. Ashbery has won nearly every major American award for poetry, including a Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award. A former Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets, Ashbery is currently the Charles P. Stevenson, Jr., Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College. He divides his time between New York City and Hudson, New York. Schuyler also received a Pulitzer Prize for his poetry, as well as a Longview Foundation Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 191 pages
• Publisher: Ecco Pr; 1st Ecco Ed edition (June 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0880015233
• ISBN-13: 978-0880015233
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,047,178 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars a good romp, May 26, 2000

By 

"javits2000" - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Nest of Ninnies (Hardcover)

Who would think that two experimental poets could write a comic novel without stylistic pretensions? There's nothing profound here, just a quick read with plenty of laughs. The title conveys the substance fairly well: Schuyler and Ashbery have created a cast of middle- to upper-class fools for whom they have little respect. This could, of course, be fairly tiresome ("aren't the bourgeosie so silly!"), if it weren't for the authors' keen sense of humor. Think of this as a detailed pitch for a good Woody Allen movie, or a Firbank novel for the mid-twentieth century.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Auden was right, April 17, 2007

By 

dpk - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Nest of Ninnies (Hardcover)

This book deserves to be recognized as the "minor classic" W. H. Auden thought it was destined to become. The high camp of much of the proceedings only makes the book more profound in its investigation of the contemporary manners of negotiating affect through objects. In this it looks back to Wilde and Henry James, as it does also in its arch staging of the objectification of a mystified "Europe." Entirely fascinating, urbanely hilarious.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Uncle Albert Says: abandon yourself to the pleasures of farce, June 25, 2010

By 

John Michael Albert "John-Michael Albert" (Portsmouth NH) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: A Nest of Ninnies (Paperback)

If you love farce from Faydeau through Wodehouse through Joe Keenan (Blue Heaven, Putting on the Ritz, and the first few years of Frasier) you'll love this book. If you don't, please don't read it. I picked it up because it's by two of the '50s era New York School poets, Ashbery and Schuyler. I happen to enjoy that school of poetry, even more than I love their contemporary West Coast poets like Ginsberg, Corso, and company (and I love those too). This is the sort of delightful ego exercise on the part of the author(s) where you turn the key and let the author do the driving--at any speed he wishes. In the end, none of the characters are important, no great moral lessons are learned, what happens and where it happens are more decorative than narrative or metaphorical. You have drinks with a friend and during the course of the evening, the friend tells you this long involved story that is fascinating because he's your friend. And when the evening ends and you both go your separate ways, it was a great evening for no reason more complicated than you spent it with a great friend, who can tell some whopping good stories. Dump all that earnest book-reading you picked up in school and church and let yourself go; read this book and others like it (see Faydeau, Wodehouse, Keenan and company) as one of the top five pleasures of life. You've already abandoned yourself to numbers one and two and survived, right?