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Today, Soft Skull is delighted to be publishing a new edition of Douglas A. Martin's Branwell, an impressionistic reimagining of the life of the least-known Bront? sibling.
Branwell Bront? spent his childhood isolated in his family's parsonage on the moors, collaborating on stories and poems with his sisters. But while Emily, Charlotte, and Anne went on to write Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and Agnes Grey, Branwell wandered from job to job, growing dependent on alcohol and opium and failing to become a great artist. "His passion could not be elevated, transformed, and redeemed," Darcey Steinke writes in her introduction. This tender, haunting book explores why.
Branwell, which has been called a "queer speculative biography," is a book for any reader fascinated by the history of the Bront?s, and anyone looking for radical portrayals of desire and addiction. It's for anyone who has ever known the weight of family expectations or the confinements of gender. According to The Brooklyn Rail, the prose is "so finely wrought that the novel has an otherworldly feel"; according to Publishers Weekly, its sentences are "perfectly fitted to this famously imaginative, headstrong family; they bring Branwell Bront?''s world to light."
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Douglas A. Martin's first novel, Outline of My Lover, was an International Book of the Year in The Times Literary Supplement, a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, and adapted for the multimedia ballet/live film Kammer/Kammer. He is co-author of The Haiku Year and co-editor of Kathy Acker: The Last Interview and Other Conversations. His books of poetry and prose include In the Time of Assignments, Your Body Figured, Acker, and most recently an anti true crime novel, Wolf. 
Darcey Steinke is the author of the nonfiction books Flash Count Diary and Easter Everywhere and five novels: Sister Golden Hair, Milk, Jesus Saves, Suicide Blonde, and Up Through the Water. She has taught at the New School, Columbia University School of the Arts, New York University, Princeton, and the American University of Paris. 
"Anyone curious about the alchemy and sheer amount of work that goes into making a single author's success will be entranced by this fascinating work." 
"Does contemporary American literature offer any greater pleasure than the polymorphous brilliance of Wayne Koestenbaum? These essays are extraordinary." 
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