William Benton

William Benton received his early training in music, and worked as a jazz musician before becoming a writer. He is the author of several books of poetry, including Marmalade, Normal Meanings, Eye La View, Birds, and The Bell Poems. His poetry has been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Open City, and other magazines.

He has written a number of catalogue essays on artists, among them Joan Brown, Duncan Hannah, George Johanson, and James McGarrell. He is also the author of Madly, a novel. His most recent books are A Quatrain on Sleeping Beauty’s Tomb, a translation of Boris Pasternak’s poems, and Exchanging Hats, on the paintings of Elizabeth Bishop. He lives in New York City.

Books

Gods of Tin

The Flying Years

A singular life often circles around a singular moment, an occasion when one's life in the world is defined forever and the emotional vocabulary set. For the extraordinary writer James Salter, this moment was contained in the fighter planes over Korea where, during his young manhood, he flew more than one hundred missions.

James Salter is considered one of America's greatest prose stylists. The Arm of Flesh (later revised and retitled Cassada) and his first novel, The Hunters, are legendary in military circles for their descriptions of flying and aerial combat. A former Air Force pilot who flew F–86 fighters in Korea, Salter writes with matchless insight about the terror and exhilaration of the pilot's life.

Madly

A Novel

Love, with its fear, exhilaration and transcendence, is perhaps the most enduring subject in the literature of the world.

About 11 o'clock on a late August night in Manhattan, Bill stops by his local video store, and in the nearly vacant shop meets an exotic stranger looking for advice on which movie to rent. In their fragmented and awkward first conversation, they exchange phone numbers and she rides away on her bicycle with a copy of Jules and Jim.

"At two that morning my phone rang. The machine answered; it was Irina saying how much she liked the movie." Not long after, they meet and soon begin a love affair, filled with tension and tenderness, as they navigate through their separate pasts to find a road to travel together, for as long as their fates allow. Madly is a story of accident and inflected passion, of disruption, erotic and doomed. As Bill comes to realize Irina's disturbed, tenuous hold on reality, his own hold on Irina turns relentless and obsessive.