SONG SO WILD AND BLUE: A LIFE WITH THE MUSIC OF JONI MITCHELL, HarperOne, forthcoming February 2025
From the moment Paul Lisicky heard Joni Mitchell while growing up in New Jersey, he recognized she was that rarity among musicians--a talent whose combination of introspection, liberation, and deep musicality set her apart from any other artist of the time. As a young man, Paul was a budding songwriter who took his cues from Mitchell's mysteries and idiosyncrasies. But as he matured, he set his guitar aside and lost himself in prose, a practice that would eventually take him to the Iowa Writers' Workshop and into the professional world of letters.
As the decades passed, Paul's connection to Mitchell's artistry only deepened. Joni's music was a constant, a guide to life and an artist's manual in one. As Paul navigated love and heartbreak and imaginative struggles and the vicissitudes of a creative career, he would return again and again to the lessons found in Joni's songs, to the solace and challenges that only her musicianship could give.
Song So Wild and Blue is a gorgeously written, beautifully intimate, and unique tribute to the woman whose artistry shaped generations of creators and thinkers. Lisicky offers his own coming-of-adulthood as testimony to the power of songwriting and staying true to your creative vision. A guide to life that is part memoir, part biography, and part homage, Song So Wild and Blue is a joy for devoted Joni enthusiasts, budding writers, and artists of all stripes.
A luminous, soulful, dazzlingly original book. Every page throbs with Paul Lisicky's uncanny intelligence and unabashed avidity--for Joni, for music, for making a life in art, and for life itself. Song So Wild and Blue is truly a gift.
--CLAIRE VAYE WATKINS
An exquisite, subtle ode to the people we used to be, and their inextricable intertwinement with the artists who change us. Lisicky's love letter to Joni Mitchell is part coming-of-age story, part romance, part biography, and it left me aglow with recognition and wonder.
--MELISSA FEBOS
Paul Lisicky’s Song So Wild and Blue is an astonishing exploration of what it means to lead an artist’s life—how to last, dig deep, change, to embrace one’s voice while in conversation with your heroes. There is no writer more attentive than Lisicky, and to see him turn his brilliance to Joni Mitchell is a thrilling wonder. Some of us have been waiting for him to write a book about his relationship to her for years. This book exceeds all my extraordinarily high expectations for its strangeness and honesty and beauty, its ability to set the gossamer wings of song on the page. I loved it.
--ELIZABETH McCRACKEN
*****
LATER: MY LIFE AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD, Graywolf Press, March 2020
One of NPR'S Best Books of 2020
One of Electric Lit's Favorite Nonfiction Books of 2020
One of Oprah Magazine's Best LGBTQ Books of 2020
One of The Washington Post's Ten Books to Read in March
One of Entertainment Weekly's 20 Must-reads for March
One of Oprah Magazine's Most Anticipated LGBTQ Books of 2020
One of Harper's Bazaar's Best LGBTQ Books of 2020
One of Library Journal's Most Anticipated Books of 2020
One of BuzzFeed's Most Anticipated Books of 2020
One of The Millions' Most Anticipated Books of 2020
One of The Philadelphia Inquirer's Best Books of Spring 2020
One of them's 14 Upcoming Queer Books of 2020
One of Book Mark's Most Anticipated Books by LGBTQ Authors of 2020
One of The Rumpus's Most Anticipated Books of 2020
One of Big Other's Most Anticipated Small Press Books of 2020
On Publishers Weekly's Spring 2020 Announcements
A Rumpus Book Club selection
When Paul Lisicky arrived in Provincetown in the early 1990s, he was leaving a history of family trauma behind to live in a place outside of time, known for its values of inclusion, acceptance, and art. In this idyllic haven, Lisicky searches for love and connection and comes into his own as he finds a sense of belonging. At the same time, the center of this community is consumed by the AIDS crisis, and the very structure of town life is being rewired out of necessity: What might this utopia look like during a time of dystopia? Later dramatizes a spectacular-yet-ravaged place and a unique era when more fully becoming one’s self collided with the realization that ongoingness couldn’t be taken for granted, and staying alive from moment to moment exacted absolute attention.
A vibrant, heart-bursting love letter to queer haven Provincetown, Massachusetts.... But the terrain Lisicky also covers here is that of the human heart freed, momentarily, from terror.
--OPRAH MAGAZINE
Brutally honest... A candid, scorching memoir that emits tenderness and sweet sorrow.
--KIRKUS REVIEWS
Lisicky brings his signature attentive and sumptuous prose to yet another tender, vital work of literature.
--LIT HUB
Radiant.
--THE MILLIONS
Heartfelt.
--LIBRARY JOURNAL
Vivid, resonant.
--NJ MONTHLY
A sobering sense of impermanence permeates the pages of Later, which acts as a ruminative guide to an exhilarating queer utopia, one reeling from the impact of a dystopian age.
--THEM
*****
THE NARROW DOOR, Graywolf Press, January 2016
A New York Times Editors' Choice
Finalist for the Randy Shilts Award from the Publishing Triangle
A Rumpus Book Club selection
Named one of the Most Exciting Books of 2016 by BUZZFEED, THE WEEK, and THE MILLIONS
Named a Best Book of the Year by SHELF AWARENESS, GOOGLE PLAY, THE MIAMI HERALD, LARGEHEARTED BOY, and THE COIL
In The Narrow Door, Paul Lisicky creates a compelling collage of scenes and images drawn from two long-term relationships, one with a woman novelist and the other with his ex-husband, a poet. The contours of these relationships shift constantly. Denise and Paul, stretched by the demands of their writing lives, drift apart, and Paul's romance begins to falter. And the world around them is frail: environmental catastrophes like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, natural disasters like the earthquake in Haiti, and local disturbances make an unsettling backdrop to the pressing concerns of Denise's cancer diagnosis and Paul's impending breakup. Lisicky's compassionate heart and resilience seem all the stronger in the face of such searing losses. His survival--hard-won, unsentimental, authentic--proves that in turning toward loss, we embrace life.
Heartbreaking and breathtaking. --PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The most moving account of love among artists I've ever read. The Narrow Door is astonishing.
--GARTH GREENWELL
*****
UNBUILT PROJECTS, Four Way Books, 2012
A selection of The Rumpus Poetry Book Club
Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award
We encounter a collision of God, sex, family, childhood and adulthood within the realm of these short pieces, and we encounter the palpable pain of the speaker as he mourns a mother lost to dementia: "Who knew you were the ground we walked on, dreamed on?" Through the intersection of these varied themes, we are made privy to the speaker's interior world--"And all I can say, today, is Joy, visit me now"--as well as made witness to the exterior world--"Sun on skin, hot gold light frying the hydrangea." Ultimately, these stories give us everything, and so we are left wanting nothing, except more.
Paul Lisicky always has the capacity to break your heart for he has the diviner's gift for finding the wellsprings of the quietest sorrows. --JOY WILLIAMS
With brief electric sentences . . . of consummate beauty Lisicky starts out from the joy in childhood and relates the sad and wondrous details of intimaces both familial and romantic. . . . If there's a place for poetry and prose to co-habitate, it's here in Lisicky's world. --D.A. POWELL
Lisicky's gently beautiful Unbuilt Projects is a prose collection that collects thoughts and undoes them in equal measure. It sidesteps the arc of linear narrative in favor of the reality of how we live, which is in bursts that fuse imagination and reality. --THE RUMPUS
*****
THE BURNING HOUSE, Etruscan Press, 2011
In this novel, narrator Isidore Mirsky finds his close-knit family and community suddenly coming apart. Facing the illnesses of family members and the loss of homes in a recession-plagued seashore town, he also contends with an overwhelming new desire--his feelings for his wife's sister. The Burning House finds its narrator at his most vulnerable, and explores what it means to be a good man amidst chaos.
An extraordinary fiction in that it sustains a believable poetic voice throughout. . . . Lisicky's longer prose piece . . . often feels like a long, beautiful narrative poem about what it is to be flawed and human in a world that often seems, at best, indifferent. --THE BOSTON GLOBE
A vigorous, interior-driven narrative. . . . Lisicky is a beautiful and powerful writer; his prose has a palpable energy that demands close attention. --PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A pitch-perfect gem of a novel. --JAYNE ANNE PHILLIPS
In language that's simultaneously muscular and tender, both butch and queer . . . Lisicky questions what it means to be shoehorned into a body. . . . Using all the techniques of a poem--ellipses, disjunction, compression--The Burning House presents us with prose at its lyrical best: language that both assets itself in its grandeur while simultaneously questioning its ability to capture the marrow of experience.
--ANGELO NIKOLOPOULOS
*****
FAMOUS BUILDER, Graywolf Press, 2002
Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award
In these lively, loving essays, Lisicky explores the constant impulse to rebuild the self. With gracious, thoughtful candor and pitch-perfect humor, he explores the very personal realms of childhood dreams and ambitions, adolescent sexual awakenings, and adult realities.
His prose--as vivid as it is ethereal--gracefully transports reader's to the artist's interior world as he attempts to find the appropriate vehicle for his self-expression. --PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Stunning and revealing... Famous Builder is a rare feat of imagination, forming an exquisite architecture of the self. --MICHAEL TAECKENS, OUT
[Famous Builder] reads as if it's been rinsed in light. --ALEXANDER CHEE, PW DAILY
*****
LAWNBOY, Turtle Point Press, 1999, reisussed Graywolf Press, 2006
Finalist for the Stonewall Book Award-Barbara Gittings Literature Award
Seventeen-year-old Evan's adventure begins with mowing a neighbor's lawn, a summer job that leads him into an unpredictable world of desire and betrayal. Estranged from his parents and older brother, he moves in with forty-one-year-old William and begins a disastrous series of attempts to make a new home. Must he choose between his family and desire? First published to wide acclaim in 1999, Lawnboy wanders the tumultuous landscape of the early 1990s, its South Florida setting as fertile and troubling as Evan's inner life.
A lushy emotional, romantic and tragic pursuit. --PAPER
Paul Lisicky has a bright, narrative style . . . a voice to watch. --FLAUNT
Lisicky's prose shines, at times hilarious, at others entrenched in sorrow and longing, but always gorgeous to read. . . . The reconciliations between the characters are moving and earned, graced with compassion and vitality. --BRET ANTHONY JOHNSTON, BOOK
From the moment Paul Lisicky heard Joni Mitchell while growing up in New Jersey, he recognized she was that rarity among musicians--a talent whose combination of introspection, liberation, and deep musicality set her apart from any other artist of the time. As a young man, Paul was a budding songwriter who took his cues from Mitchell's mysteries and idiosyncrasies. But as he matured, he set his guitar aside and lost himself in prose, a practice that would eventually take him to the Iowa Writers' Workshop and into the professional world of letters.
As the decades passed, Paul's connection to Mitchell's artistry only deepened. Joni's music was a constant, a guide to life and an artist's manual in one. As Paul navigated love and heartbreak and imaginative struggles and the vicissitudes of a creative career, he would return again and again to the lessons found in Joni's songs, to the solace and challenges that only her musicianship could give.
Song So Wild and Blue is a gorgeously written, beautifully intimate, and unique tribute to the woman whose artistry shaped generations of creators and thinkers. Lisicky offers his own coming-of-adulthood as testimony to the power of songwriting and staying true to your creative vision. A guide to life that is part memoir, part biography, and part homage, Song So Wild and Blue is a joy for devoted Joni enthusiasts, budding writers, and artists of all stripes.
A luminous, soulful, dazzlingly original book. Every page throbs with Paul Lisicky's uncanny intelligence and unabashed avidity--for Joni, for music, for making a life in art, and for life itself. Song So Wild and Blue is truly a gift.
--CLAIRE VAYE WATKINS
An exquisite, subtle ode to the people we used to be, and their inextricable intertwinement with the artists who change us. Lisicky's love letter to Joni Mitchell is part coming-of-age story, part romance, part biography, and it left me aglow with recognition and wonder.
--MELISSA FEBOS
Paul Lisicky’s Song So Wild and Blue is an astonishing exploration of what it means to lead an artist’s life—how to last, dig deep, change, to embrace one’s voice while in conversation with your heroes. There is no writer more attentive than Lisicky, and to see him turn his brilliance to Joni Mitchell is a thrilling wonder. Some of us have been waiting for him to write a book about his relationship to her for years. This book exceeds all my extraordinarily high expectations for its strangeness and honesty and beauty, its ability to set the gossamer wings of song on the page. I loved it.
--ELIZABETH McCRACKEN
*****
LATER: MY LIFE AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD, Graywolf Press, March 2020
One of NPR'S Best Books of 2020
One of Electric Lit's Favorite Nonfiction Books of 2020
One of Oprah Magazine's Best LGBTQ Books of 2020
One of The Washington Post's Ten Books to Read in March
One of Entertainment Weekly's 20 Must-reads for March
One of Oprah Magazine's Most Anticipated LGBTQ Books of 2020
One of Harper's Bazaar's Best LGBTQ Books of 2020
One of Library Journal's Most Anticipated Books of 2020
One of BuzzFeed's Most Anticipated Books of 2020
One of The Millions' Most Anticipated Books of 2020
One of The Philadelphia Inquirer's Best Books of Spring 2020
One of them's 14 Upcoming Queer Books of 2020
One of Book Mark's Most Anticipated Books by LGBTQ Authors of 2020
One of The Rumpus's Most Anticipated Books of 2020
One of Big Other's Most Anticipated Small Press Books of 2020
On Publishers Weekly's Spring 2020 Announcements
A Rumpus Book Club selection
When Paul Lisicky arrived in Provincetown in the early 1990s, he was leaving a history of family trauma behind to live in a place outside of time, known for its values of inclusion, acceptance, and art. In this idyllic haven, Lisicky searches for love and connection and comes into his own as he finds a sense of belonging. At the same time, the center of this community is consumed by the AIDS crisis, and the very structure of town life is being rewired out of necessity: What might this utopia look like during a time of dystopia? Later dramatizes a spectacular-yet-ravaged place and a unique era when more fully becoming one’s self collided with the realization that ongoingness couldn’t be taken for granted, and staying alive from moment to moment exacted absolute attention.
A vibrant, heart-bursting love letter to queer haven Provincetown, Massachusetts.... But the terrain Lisicky also covers here is that of the human heart freed, momentarily, from terror.
--OPRAH MAGAZINE
Brutally honest... A candid, scorching memoir that emits tenderness and sweet sorrow.
--KIRKUS REVIEWS
Lisicky brings his signature attentive and sumptuous prose to yet another tender, vital work of literature.
--LIT HUB
Radiant.
--THE MILLIONS
Heartfelt.
--LIBRARY JOURNAL
Vivid, resonant.
--NJ MONTHLY
A sobering sense of impermanence permeates the pages of Later, which acts as a ruminative guide to an exhilarating queer utopia, one reeling from the impact of a dystopian age.
--THEM
*****
THE NARROW DOOR, Graywolf Press, January 2016
A New York Times Editors' Choice
Finalist for the Randy Shilts Award from the Publishing Triangle
A Rumpus Book Club selection
Named one of the Most Exciting Books of 2016 by BUZZFEED, THE WEEK, and THE MILLIONS
Named a Best Book of the Year by SHELF AWARENESS, GOOGLE PLAY, THE MIAMI HERALD, LARGEHEARTED BOY, and THE COIL
In The Narrow Door, Paul Lisicky creates a compelling collage of scenes and images drawn from two long-term relationships, one with a woman novelist and the other with his ex-husband, a poet. The contours of these relationships shift constantly. Denise and Paul, stretched by the demands of their writing lives, drift apart, and Paul's romance begins to falter. And the world around them is frail: environmental catastrophes like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, natural disasters like the earthquake in Haiti, and local disturbances make an unsettling backdrop to the pressing concerns of Denise's cancer diagnosis and Paul's impending breakup. Lisicky's compassionate heart and resilience seem all the stronger in the face of such searing losses. His survival--hard-won, unsentimental, authentic--proves that in turning toward loss, we embrace life.
Heartbreaking and breathtaking. --PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The most moving account of love among artists I've ever read. The Narrow Door is astonishing.
--GARTH GREENWELL
*****
UNBUILT PROJECTS, Four Way Books, 2012
A selection of The Rumpus Poetry Book Club
Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award
We encounter a collision of God, sex, family, childhood and adulthood within the realm of these short pieces, and we encounter the palpable pain of the speaker as he mourns a mother lost to dementia: "Who knew you were the ground we walked on, dreamed on?" Through the intersection of these varied themes, we are made privy to the speaker's interior world--"And all I can say, today, is Joy, visit me now"--as well as made witness to the exterior world--"Sun on skin, hot gold light frying the hydrangea." Ultimately, these stories give us everything, and so we are left wanting nothing, except more.
Paul Lisicky always has the capacity to break your heart for he has the diviner's gift for finding the wellsprings of the quietest sorrows. --JOY WILLIAMS
With brief electric sentences . . . of consummate beauty Lisicky starts out from the joy in childhood and relates the sad and wondrous details of intimaces both familial and romantic. . . . If there's a place for poetry and prose to co-habitate, it's here in Lisicky's world. --D.A. POWELL
Lisicky's gently beautiful Unbuilt Projects is a prose collection that collects thoughts and undoes them in equal measure. It sidesteps the arc of linear narrative in favor of the reality of how we live, which is in bursts that fuse imagination and reality. --THE RUMPUS
*****
THE BURNING HOUSE, Etruscan Press, 2011
In this novel, narrator Isidore Mirsky finds his close-knit family and community suddenly coming apart. Facing the illnesses of family members and the loss of homes in a recession-plagued seashore town, he also contends with an overwhelming new desire--his feelings for his wife's sister. The Burning House finds its narrator at his most vulnerable, and explores what it means to be a good man amidst chaos.
An extraordinary fiction in that it sustains a believable poetic voice throughout. . . . Lisicky's longer prose piece . . . often feels like a long, beautiful narrative poem about what it is to be flawed and human in a world that often seems, at best, indifferent. --THE BOSTON GLOBE
A vigorous, interior-driven narrative. . . . Lisicky is a beautiful and powerful writer; his prose has a palpable energy that demands close attention. --PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A pitch-perfect gem of a novel. --JAYNE ANNE PHILLIPS
In language that's simultaneously muscular and tender, both butch and queer . . . Lisicky questions what it means to be shoehorned into a body. . . . Using all the techniques of a poem--ellipses, disjunction, compression--The Burning House presents us with prose at its lyrical best: language that both assets itself in its grandeur while simultaneously questioning its ability to capture the marrow of experience.
--ANGELO NIKOLOPOULOS
*****
FAMOUS BUILDER, Graywolf Press, 2002
Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award
In these lively, loving essays, Lisicky explores the constant impulse to rebuild the self. With gracious, thoughtful candor and pitch-perfect humor, he explores the very personal realms of childhood dreams and ambitions, adolescent sexual awakenings, and adult realities.
His prose--as vivid as it is ethereal--gracefully transports reader's to the artist's interior world as he attempts to find the appropriate vehicle for his self-expression. --PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Stunning and revealing... Famous Builder is a rare feat of imagination, forming an exquisite architecture of the self. --MICHAEL TAECKENS, OUT
[Famous Builder] reads as if it's been rinsed in light. --ALEXANDER CHEE, PW DAILY
*****
LAWNBOY, Turtle Point Press, 1999, reisussed Graywolf Press, 2006
Finalist for the Stonewall Book Award-Barbara Gittings Literature Award
Seventeen-year-old Evan's adventure begins with mowing a neighbor's lawn, a summer job that leads him into an unpredictable world of desire and betrayal. Estranged from his parents and older brother, he moves in with forty-one-year-old William and begins a disastrous series of attempts to make a new home. Must he choose between his family and desire? First published to wide acclaim in 1999, Lawnboy wanders the tumultuous landscape of the early 1990s, its South Florida setting as fertile and troubling as Evan's inner life.
A lushy emotional, romantic and tragic pursuit. --PAPER
Paul Lisicky has a bright, narrative style . . . a voice to watch. --FLAUNT
Lisicky's prose shines, at times hilarious, at others entrenched in sorrow and longing, but always gorgeous to read. . . . The reconciliations between the characters are moving and earned, graced with compassion and vitality. --BRET ANTHONY JOHNSTON, BOOK