James Schuyler's utterly original What's for Dinner? features a cast of characters who appear to have escaped from a Norman Rockwell painting to run amok. In tones that are variously droll, deadpan, and lyrical, Schuyler tells a story that revolves around three small-town American households.The Delehanteys are an old-fashioned Catholic family whose twin teenage boys are getting completely out of hand, no matter that their father is hardly one to spare the rod. Childless Norris and Lottie Taylor have been happily married for years, even as Lottie has been slowly drinking herself to death. Mag, a recent widow, is on the prowl for love. Retreating to an institution to dry out, Lottie finds herself caught up in a curious comedy of group therapy manners. At the same time, however, she begins an ascent from the depths of despair—illuminated with the odd grace and humor that readers of Schuyler's masterful poetry know so well—to a new understanding, that will turn her into an improbable redeemer within an unlikely world. What's for Dinner? is among the most delightful and unusual works of American literature. Charming and dark, off-kilter but pedestrian, mercurial yet matter-of-fact, Schuyler's novel is an alluring invention that captures both the fragility and the tenacity of ordinary life.

Schuyler's notebook entries facing Darragh Park's drawings.

Poet Mark Ford has described the letters of James Schuyler as “witty, graceful, sophisticated, and gossipy.” Particularly poignant are these Schuyler letters to fellow poet Frank O’Hara. Entertaining and transcendently poetic, they are the portrait of a friendship between two great New York School poets.

The search for ways to contain the evanescence, fragility and ephemeral beauty of the moment has preoccupied lyric poets from Catullus and Herrick to James Schuyler. For Schuyler, indeed, discovering and glowing in the ineffable contingency of the moment was both theme and goal. Nowhere in his work is this more true than in that marvelous celebration of the miracle of impermanence, his remarkable Diary, here made available in full for the first time.

The Diary, editor Nathan Kernan has noted, "is a work of art; it is, in a large sense, a poem. Stylistically it is of a piece with Schuyler's poems: it is cut from the same cloth, or is, in places, the cloth from which the poems were cut . . . The Diary's peculiar combination of fragment, meticulous description, literary allusion, commonplace book and remembrance is beautiful in its own right, and very much a window into the mind that wrote the poems."

Nathan Kernan's extremely thoughtful, scrupulous and informed editing provides this long-awaited volume a scholarly care it deserves. Kernan's editorial glosses and biographical sketches on the cast of characters, placing Schuyler in a rich social context of poets, artists and friends, provide what amounts to a handy thumbnail history of the New York School.

In Selected Poems, we experience the full range of James Schuyler's achievement, confirming that he was among the late twentieth century's truly vital and distinctive poetic voices. One of the most significant writers of the New York School—which unofficially included John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and Kenneth Koch, among others—Schuyler was strongly influenced by both art and music in his work, often incorporating rapid shifts in sound, shape, and color within his poems that almost gave his work the effect of a collage and engendered comparisons with Whitman and Rimbaud.

Edited by poet Simon Petit, this book presents Schuyler's essays and articles composed mostly for the influential trade periodical Art News during his tenure as associate editor (1957-1962). A vivid composite portrait of the New York art scene of that time, this selection includes pieces on such artists as Gorky, Pollock, Rothko, Kline, Frankenthaler, Rivers, Rauschenberg and, of course, Fairfield Porter. Many articles are illustrated with photographs of the work.

Other Flowers brings together 165 unseen poems from James Schuyler, one of the twentieth century’s most acclaimed writers. This carefully arranged edition presents a broad range of Schuyler’s work, spanning from the early 1950s until his death in 1991. These poems exhibit Schuyler’s virtuosity in drawing from real life, interpersonal history, nature, and pop culture to create reverberant portraits of the everyday. To read these poems is to rediscover the fresh clarity and grandeur of even the smallest things. Other Flowers confirms Schuyler’s status as one of the most important figures in contemporary poetics.

Just the Thing serves as a companion to Schuyler's poems and a fine portrait of the poets of the New York School.

Published in 1974.

Schuyler's breakthrough poetry book, his first major collection. Originally printed in 1969 and re-published a decade later in 1979.