A Nest of Ninnies

"James Schuyler and I began writing A Nest of Ninnies purely by chance," writes John Ashbery in his new introduction to this classic of American comic fiction. "We were in a car being driven by the young cameraman, Harrison Starr, with his father as a passenger in the front seat . . . Jimmy said, 'Why don't we write a novel?' And how do we do that, I asked. 'It's easy-- you write the first line,' was his reply." The result is one of the strangest and most exuberant experiments in American literary history, a verbal tour de force of suburban Americana. First published in 1969, A Nest of Ninnies is a true gem-in-the-rough, the decades-long collaborative project from two of the great poetic minds of the twentieth century.

"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

"As a comedy of American manners, there is very little, if anything, to compare with A Nest of Ninnies, and it remains as strong and as clever and as funny today as when it was first published in 1969." -Brian Evenson

"The best comic novel I've read since Lolita." -F. W. Dupree