The many beautiful, complex books of the acclaimed French authorGeorges Perec (1936-1982) include Life: A User's Manual, A Void, W: Or the Memory of Childhood, Things: A Story of the Sixties, A Man Asleep, and 53 Days. Harry Mathews (1930-2017) was born in New York. A founding editor of the literary journal Locus Solus, he wrote novels, poetry, short fiction, essays, and translations from the French. His many books include Cigarettes (1987), The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium (1999), and The Human Country (2002). Monica de la Torre's is the author of Repetition Nineteen ; she teaches at Brooklyn College.

Ellis Island combines poetry with prose and literary quotation with empirical fact, employing the hybridity of text to reflect upon the very concept of integration. While exploring the island—its history, its buildings, its leftovers—Perec identifies Ellis Island as a non-place, an isle of tears, and reveals Emma Lazarus’s metaphor of America’s ‘golden door,’ which is emblazoned upon the Statue of Liberty, to be little but a false promise.

Part history, part memoir, part meditation, this extended essay is a strikingly original and striking book.

The lyric study of Ellis Island is a mournful counterfactual about what might have been had his parents—and many others—made it across the ocean.… If Perec took pride in not repeating himself, it did not stop him from returning, as if in an elliptical orbit, to the same obsessions: police states, citizens going missing, organized brutality, human fragility. - Paul Grimstad

Graceful and intriguing.