http://www.cronybooks.net

Available in September 2019

So-called stories of the past 40 years chronicling my existence in the East Village of Manhattan – from youthful bewilderment to a perhaps more mature assessment of the peculiarities.

Cover by Sheila McManus.

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Three Journals

NEW YORK, April 2017 – Crony Books is pleased to announce the publication of Three Journals, the sixth book by Greg Masters from Crony Books.

Three Journals chronicles reflections from one mind in three disparate locations at three different times: Europe and Morocco, 1974-75; the East Village of Manhattan, 1977-1978; and Mexico, 1985. Three Journals sustains a tone throughout that is an appreciation of basic dailiness and confirms a process rare in books these days – thought and then energizing thought by expressing it in enlivened language. While on the surface it chronicles wanderings through Europe, Mexico and domestic adventures from Manhattan’s East Village, really what’s occurring is a lively and discerning examination from three locales at three stages of adulthood.

“Greg’s writing is so descriptive and candid and perfect.”
– Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick and Summer of Hate
Three Journals…is really a joy to read, full of insight and the pleasure of being accompanied by an urbane guide. I loved how Masters observed things and then swerved away from them just as easily. A case in point: “Manhattan has a new hairstyle. It affects everyone.” And that’s all we learn about it. Perfect!
– Vincent Katz, author of Southness, Swimming Home
Arya Fomonyuy, writing for Readers’ Favorite, said: Three Journals by Greg Masters is a masterpiece in the area of journaling, a great work featuring powerful journal entries. No, readers are not offered gripping plots they’d find in thrillers, but the kind of writing that transports them and forces them to look at life through some historic moments in three different locations and times, reflections from a mind with a rare sense of acuity…This is a book that captures the soul and the spirit of the periods it covers with vivid clarity and one cannot help falling in love with the setting, the historical references, the cultural and social commentaries, and the very life throbbing within the narration….The author captures reality in its minutest detail without coming across as boring. Three Journals by Greg Masters presents the musings, the adventures, and the low and high moments of someone who feeds his consciousness by capturing the reality within his milieu in powerful and seductive prose.
Four five-star reviews on Amazon:
“…an enjoyable sojourn…”
“Nonfiction masterpiece”
“A great find”
“A non-fiction gem!”
“A delightful read”

When he arrived in Manhattan’s East Village in the mid-1970s, Greg Masters pounded rock and roll drums and began attending readings and workshops at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church and the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. Along with Michael Scholnick and Gary Lenhart, he edited the poetry magazine Mag City from 1977-1985. In 1977-78, along with poet comrades, he organized and produced a cable TV show, Public Access Poetry, now available online thanks to the Poetry Project. From 1980-83, he edited the Poetry Project Newsletter. His poems have appeared in a number of glorious obscure publications. This is his sixth book from Crony Books.

The 184-page paperback, Three Journals (ISBN 978-0-9859267-9-3) is available for $15 online at Book Baby, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other bookstores and distributors, domestic and global.

An ebook version (ISBN 978-0-9974285-2-0) is available for $2.99 globally from most online sources, including Amazon Kindle, iBooks, Nook by Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Copia, and more.

Review copies, images and more information are available from greg@cronybooks.net.

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What All the Songs Add Up To

NEW YORK, June 2016 – Crony Books is pleased to announce the publication of What All the Songs Add Up To, a book of poems by Greg Masters.

Forty years of poems from the East Village of Manhattan, a community of artistic and social vibrancy amid the nation’s detritus. From the mid-1970s to 2016, the poems range from expressions of youthful concerns – fueled by rock and roll, freedom and excess afforded by bohemian existence and rebellion against mainstream values – to perhaps more mature reflections and observances – and wariness of mainstream values.

When he arrived in Manhattan’s East Village in the mid-1970s, Greg Masters pounded rock and roll drums in basement clubs, dives, “alternative” spaces, CBGB and Irving Plaza and began attending readings and workshops at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church and the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. Along with Michael Scholnick and Gary Lenhart, he edited the poetry magazine Mag City from 1977-1985. In 1977-78, along with a crew of poet comrades, he organized and produced a cable TV show, Public Access Poetry, now available online thanks to the Poetry Project. From 1980-83, he edited the Poetry Project Newsletter. His poems have appeared in a number of glorious obscure publications. This is his fifth book from Crony Books. Two more are scheduled for fall 2016 – stories and journals.

“Greg’s writing is so descriptive and candid and perfect.”
– Chris Kraus, author of Summer of Hate and I Love Dick

The 108-page paperback, What All the Songs Add Up To (978-0-9859267-7-9), is for sale online for $15 at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Angus & Robertson and other bookstores and distributors, domestic and global.

An ebook version (978-0-9974285-0-6) is available globally for around $6.99 (U.S.) from most online sources, including Amazon Kindle, iBooks, Nook by Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Copia, Gardners Books, National Book Store, Baker & Taylor and more.

Review copies, images and more information are available from greg@cronybooks.net.

Hear Greg Masters reading from this book here.

***For the Artists: Critical Writing, Volume 2***

While For the Artists: Critical Writing, Volume 1, issued earlier in 2014, focused on Masters’ collected writings on the visual arts, this new volume gathers reviews of music and books, including critical essays and an interview with musician/writer Richard Hell.

Perhaps most prominent are a series of essays on the electric period of Miles Davis. In-depth reviews examine the aural sensations this creative artist forged in the late 60s through mid-70s, a continual reinvention of sounds that, as Masters claims, is “rebellious in its uncompromising intensity and uncategorizable for its urgent flooding past genre definitions.”

The eclectic book also examine the work of Gertrude Stein, William Wordsworth, William Carlos Williams, Blaise Cendrars, Eileen Myles and Chuck Wachtel, among others.

Age of Mimeo • Animal Logic • Bluestones and Salt Hay • Buzzcocks • William Burroughs: Letters to Allen Ginsberg • Blaise Cendrars: Collected Poems • Miles Davis: The Cellar Door Sessions 1970 • Miles Davis, The Complete On The Corner Sessions • Miles Davis: Electric Miles • Miles Davis: Review of two new books on the making of Kind of Blue • Miles Davis: Review of Wall to Wall Miles, a tribute at Symphony Space • Allen Ginsberg • Charlie Haden: Liberation Music Orchestra • Richard Hell/Amanda Uprichard Interview • Deborah Holland: Freudian Slip • Mag City • Edgar Lee Masters: Spoon River Anthology • Eileen Myles • Finding and Not Finding Voice: Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives • Chuck Wachtel: Joe the Engineer • Chuck Wachtel: The Gates • William Carlos Williams/Marcia Nardi • Woodstock • Wordsworth and the Sublime Review copies, images and more information are available from: greg@cronybooks.net

Greg Masters always hears things others miss.” – James Hale, DownBeat magazine contributor

The 176-page softcover edition (ISBN: 978-0-9859267-5-5) is available for $9.99 from Crony Books via PayPal.

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The ebook edition (ISBN: 978-0-9859267-4-8) is available for $3.99 from:

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For the Artists: Critical Writing, Volume 1

This collection chronicles an exciting time in the artworld of 1980s Manhattan when a burgeoning gallery scene in the East Village evolved to rival the more established gallery outposts on 57th Street. And, Greg Masters, writing for a number of publications, covered it all – the well-known names and the upstart younger painters, photographers, sculptors, film-makers and creative folks working in various media pushing boundaries and complementing the existing legacy system more accustomed to uptown sensibilities.

Illustrating the text are 10 artist portraits by internationally acclaimed photographer Barry Kornbluh, as well as a number of reproductions of artists’ work, including two never-before-published drawings by Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Greg Masters brings a streetwise beat reporter’s savvy to his assignments. His interviewer’s questions are always to the point, intelligently formulated, and tactfully posed. When he comes to process his experiences with artists, it is his poet’s eye and ear that come into play. These words Masters wrote about Larry Rivers apply equally well to Masters’ own approach: “He dismembers the expected and embellishes the familiar.” – Vincent Katz, poet, author and critic

Interviews with:
Rudy Burckhardt, Philip Hartman & Doris Kornish, Jean Holabird, Sam Messer, Elizabeth Murray, Larry Rivers, Sandy Skoglund.

Reviews of gallery and museum shows by:
Colette Alvarez Urbajtel, Suzanne Anker, Chet Augustine, Milton Avery, Adam Bartos, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Peter Bellamy, Joseph Beuys, Ronald Bladen, Chris Bobin, Suzanne Bocanegra, Rudy Burckhardt, Rene Burri, Marc Chagall, Stuart Davis, Werner Drewes, John Duch, Don Freemann, Omar Galliani, Michael Goldberg, Stephen Greene, Robert Hameline, Louise Hamlin , Eric Holzman, Yvonne Jacquette, Joel Janowitz, Bill Jensen, Barrie Karp, Minoru Kawabata, Peggy Katz, John Kennard, Deborah Maverick Kelley, Basil King, Kitty Klaidman, William Klein, Barry Kornbluh, Pamela Lawton, Stephanie Brody Lederman, Helen Levitt, Wyndham Lewis, Sally Mann, Shelley Marlowe, Randy Matusow, Rosemary Mayer, Karl A. Meyer, Joseph Koudelka, Eugene Richards, Gladys Nilsson, Isamu Noguchi, Robert Orsini, Park Avenue Cubists, Ljubomir Rastovski, Scott Richter, George Schneeman, Emil Schumacher, Johan Scott, Andres Serrano, Barbara Siegel, Sandy Skoglund, Jim St. Clair, Michelle Spark, Surrealism, Alphonse Van Woerkom, Edouard Vuillard, Sasha Waters, Todd Weinstein, David Wilson, Trevor Winkfield, Francesca Woodman, William Zorach, Michael Zwack.

For the print edition, click here.

The ebook edition is available for $2.99 from:

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At Maureen’s

by Bernadette Mayer and Greg Masters

At Maureen’s is a double journal offering a Rashomon-like take on a month spent house-sitting in Connecticut. Two poets from the bohemian enclaves of the East Village of Manhattan do what they can to acclimate to their new rural surroundings: a horse, raspberries, visitors, diapers, books, each other and sustained moments of concentration.It’s back to the garden for two writers and their families and friends. Only in this patch, which are weeds and which are flowers is not so certain. Two perspectives of the proceedings are on offer with sustained moments of concentration that enhance the details. Wonder and love blossom too.At the time this book was written, summer 1981, Bernadette Mayer was director of the Poetry Project, a literary center housed in St. Mark’s Church in the East Village of Manhattan. She is the recipient of the 2014 Shelley Memorial Award and the author of numerous books of poetry and prose, including A Bernadette Mayer Reader and The Helens of Troy, NY (New Directions). Greg Masters was editor of the Poetry Project Newsletter and co-editor of the poetry magazine Mag City.

“I was so moved by this book, it is a classic. It captures not just a time and a place, but a whole value of writing that’s not overblown or forced but still incredibly dynamic.”
– Chris Kraus, author of Summer of Hate and I Love Dick
“…it is the dailiness of a poet’s life and writing routines as transmitted by these two canny observers that makes this book so engaging and satisfying to me…I highly recommend it.”
– Michael Lally, poet, author of It Takes One to Know One

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Greg Masters / 437 East 12th Street #26 / NYC NY 10009-4042.

Please make the check out to Greg Masters. Sorry, we can’t accept checks for international orders.An ebook version is available for around $9.99 from most ebook publishers:
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Stumbling Into Modernity:
Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Cling to Tradition

The novels, stories and memoirs of Nobel Prize-winning author Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902–1991) are justly revered for their depiction of a population in Eastern Europe decimated by the Holocaust and, later, the immigrant’s struggle to acclimate to a new world and modern ways.

While he lovingly depicts the colorful characters and way of life of his Warsaw neighborhood at the beginning of the 20th century, intrusions arrive that disrupt everything – at first the railroads, then novels from Russia, Europe and America, and eventually Hitler’s armies.

This new book, Stumbling Into Modernity: Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Cling to Tradition, by Greg Masters, takes an admiring, yet critical look at a body of literature that reflects a crossover, not only geographic, with immigration from Poland, but from traditional, tribal values treasured in the Jewish provinces of Europe and then questioned in the new, modern world of America.

While this study seeks a place in the modern canon for Singer’s work through an appreciation of his achievements, it wrestles with his limitations in continually attempting to reconcile his past with choices available in the present. As Singer attempts to extricate himself from the dogma and strictures of his father and to find his place in an ever-changing world, Greg Masters follows along to celebrate his writing, but also, with a thorough reading in critical analysis, to critique Singer’s responses.

Singer’s attachment to the past, this book argues, crippled his character’s hopes and the perspective of the author himself.