These Threads Who Lead to Bramble

Russell Perssons These Threads Who Lead to Bramble defies the singularity of any one genre as it braids together memory and myth to challenge the limits of our collective imagination This is a book that contains multitudesa celebration of the forgotten marginalia of Westernized thought. Perssons collection delves into eccentric twentieth-century American photographers, the lives of his ancestors both distant and recent, and of the artist Egon Schiele in prison, teetering on the edge of sanity. He interweaves the careers of three obscure composersAlban Berg, Erik Satie, and Anton Webernand imagines the composers life based on listening to their music, rather than the other way around. And he charts the path of his own life from a long-ago teenage road trip, sleeping in the backs of friends cars and trying to find himself inside a vast world. As the work builds, the lines between personal memory and collective history become ever more abstract, blending inner and outer spheres to confront the unknowable expanse of universal existence. A must-read for fans of Michael Ondaatjes The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Roland Barthess Camera Lucida, and W.G. Sebalds Austerlitz. This work includes black-and-white reproductions of Egon Schieles drawings, with permission from The ALBERTINA Museum in Vienna.