Excerpts from Russell Edson's first novel, Gulping's Recital, appeared in The Moderns: An Anthology of New World Writing, edited by Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones at the time) and published by Corinth Books in 1963. That was a year prior to the New Directions publication of Edson's breakthrough collection of prose poems, The Very Thing That Happens. In the "Notes on the Authors" section at the back of The Moderns, it stated "Jonathan Williams' Jargon Press is scheduled to bring out the complete Gulping's Recital." For reasons unknown, the Jargon Press edition never materialized and it wasn't until 1984 that Gulping's Recital was finally published, by the small press Guignol Books in Rhinebeck, NY.

This first-ever reissue of Gulping's Recital is published with permission from the Estate of Russell Edson.