Forthcoming from Word Galaxy Press
A brilliant, audacious completion of Byron’s unfinished epic.
What happens when a contemporary poet takes up one of literature’s most daring unfinished challenges and brings Byron’s Don Juan to its long-delayed close?
In Finish’d! A Pleasant Trip to Hell with Byron’s Don Juan, Max Gutmann enters into high-spirited conversation with Byron’s great comic epic, extending the story in glittering ottava rima with wit, invention, literary nerve, and a sure ear for the pleasures of formal verse. Learned yet lively, playful yet deeply attentive to Byron’s original, this is not only an homage but a full-scale imaginative feat: a book for lovers of poetry, satire, Romantic literature, and anyone who relishes verbal brilliance.
Byron left Don Juan unfinished at his death. Gutmann dares to answer that absence—not by imitation alone, but by reanimating the comic, digressive, intellectually mischievous energy that made Byron’s poem one of the great performances in English verse.
The result is a rare literary event: a continuation, a completion, and a delight.
Title: Finish’d! A Pleasant Trip to Hell with Byron’s Don Juan
Author: Max Gutmann
Publisher: Word Galaxy Press
Format: Paperback / Digital editions forthcoming
Publication Date: Forthcoming
Page Count: TBA
ISBN: TBA
Written in eight cantos and animated by the comic freedom, formal energy, and satiric intelligence of Byron’s Don Juan, Max Gutmann’s Finish’d! takes up the tantalizing question readers have lived with for two centuries: how might Byron’s great unfinished poem have ended?
Gutmann’s answer is exuberant, artful, and gloriously unexpected. A poem of literary daring and genuine entertainment, Finish’d! is at once a tribute, a reinvention, and a fresh achievement in its own right.
Advance praise forthcoming.
Max Gutmann is a poet whose work combines formal dexterity, intellectual range, and comic verve. Finish’d! A Pleasant Trip to Hell with Byron’s Don Juan is a bold imaginative engagement with one of the great unfinished works in English literature.
Max Gutmann has contributed to New Statesman, The Spectator, The Washington Post, Able Muse, and other publications. His plays have been performed in New York City and throughout the U.S. Find more at his website www.maxgutmann.com .
For publication updates, preorder information, and event announcements, please check back here or contact Word Galaxy Press.
Related Subjects:
Poetry - General
Poetry - English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh
Humor - Form - Limericks & Verse
Literary Criticism - Poetry
Literary Adaptation / Reception
