Alice Through the Working Class by Steve McCaffery, illustrations by Clelia Scala

Through a mischievous application of the law of the approximate homophone “Looking Glass” changes into “Working Class” and Alice is plunged into a new (for her) historical dimension. Witty, acerbic at times, and magisterially researched Alice through the Working Class introduces its readers to a new cast of characters and encounters including Mary Wollstonecraft, Lenin, Trotsky, Fidel Castro, Tsar Nicholas II and such historic figures as Prince Kropotkin and Emma Goldberg. Throughout McCaffery is faithful to Carroll’s own style, syntax, and vocabulary; the three can be sensed palimpsestically as can the original illustrations by John Tenniel in Clelia Scala’s forty-two delightful and at times mordantly witty visual collages. Now, nine years later Alice through the Working Class and the second of McCaffery’s “Carroll Caprices,” joins its sister text Alice in Plunderland (2015). Might we expect then an Alice through the Cooking Class and an Alice in Sunderland?

“From a man who once gave us a translation into the dialect of South Yorkshire of The Communist Manifesto (by Charlie Marx and Fred Engels, two North of England chaps) no icon of our culture is safe. So, having sent poor Alice down into Plunderland, the underworld of Toronto junkies, McCaffery, with his customary linguistic wit, now takes her through the working-class, into the industrial revolution, where Mary Wollstonecraft is the Red Queen, and the Soviet workers’ paradise, where Lenin is the Lion and the Unicorn is Trotsky. And, horribile dictu, it works. Don’t miss the Bolshevik Jabberwocky.”

—Jean-Jacques Lecercle, author of Philosophy through the Looking Glass.

STEVE McCAFFERY has been twice nominated for Canada’s Governor General’s Award and is twice recipient of the American Gertrude Stein Prize for Innovative Writing. He is the author of over 40 books and chapbooks of poetry, fiction and criticism and his work has been translated into more than a dozen languages. An ample selection of his poetic explorations in numerous forms can be savored in the two volumes of Seven Pages Missing (Coach House Press). As well as Panopticon (Blewointmentpress), Tatterdemalion (Veer Books), Revanches (Xexoxial), Parsival (Roof), and Carnival: The Complete Version (Veer Books). His book-object-concept A Little Manual of Treason was commissioned for the 2011 Shajah Biennale in the United Arab Emirates. A founding member of the sound poetry ensemble Four Horsemen, TRG (Toronto Research Group) and the College of Canadian ”Pataphysics, McCaffery was a long-time resident of Toronto he now lives in Buffalo, New York. Born in the first month of 1947 in Jessop’s Hospital Sheffield, he is listed, along with John Ruskin, Margaret Drabble, Joe Cocker, and Patrick MacNee, as one of the top 100 people who were born or lived in that revered city immortalized in Peter Catanneo’s The Full Monty. Alice in Plunderland, the first of McCaffery’s two “Carroll Caprices” was published by BookThug in 2015, with collage illustrations by Clelia Scala.

CLELIA SCALA is a visual artist whose work includes mask and puppet design, installations, collage, and illustration. Publications include a series of 42 collages for the book Alice in Plunderland (BookThug, Toronto 2015) by Steve McCaffery and 11 collages for I Can Say Interpellation (BookThug, Toronto 2011) by Stephen Cain. She teaches puppetry and theatre design in the Dan School of Drama and Music at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario. www.clelia.ca

Book Information:

· Paperback: 178 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-467-3

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