Joe Brainards I Remember is a literary and artistic cult classic, praised and admired by writers from Paul Auster to John Ashery and Edmund White.
As autobiography, Brainards method was brilliantly simple: to set down specific memories as they rose to the surface of his consciousness, each prefaced by the refrain I remember: I remember when I thought that if you did anything bad, policemen would put you in jail.
Brainards enduring gem of a book has been issued in various forms over the past thirty years.
In 1970, Angel Hair books published the first edition of I Remember , which quickly sold out; he wrote two subsequent volumes for Angel Hair, More I Remember (1972) and More I Remember More (1973), both of which proved as popular as the original.
In 1973, the Museum of Modern Art in New York published Brainards I Remember Christmas , a new text for which he also contributed a cover design and four drawings.
Excerpts from the Angel Hair editions appeared in Interview , Gay Sunshine , The World and the New York Herald .
Then in 1975, Full Court Press issued a revised version collecting all three of the Angel Hair volumes and added new material, using the original title I Remember .
This complete edition is prefaced by poet and translator Ron Padgett.
The Paris Review
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