Experts Are Puzzled

Fiction. Edited by George Fragopoulos. Introduction by Mark Jacobs and George Fragopoulos. A nearly impossible text to categorize--is it a collection of short stories, prose poems, manifestos or something else entirely?--EXPERTS ARE PUZZLED is one of Laura Riding's earliest and most intense examinations of poetry's and language's relationship to truth. In essayistic examinations such as the titular piece, "Introduction to a book on Money," and "An Address to America," Riding seeks to articulate a higher, more poetic notion of truth and truth telling, a project that would later result in her famous renunciation of poetry itself. As such, EXPERTS ARE PUZZLED stands as an essential text in better understanding why it is that Riding rejected poetry and stopped writing it altogether in the late 1930s. While excerpts and selections from EXPERTS have been published before, most notably in Riding's The Progress of Stories, the entirety of the collection has not appeared in print since its initial publication by Jonathan Cape in 1930.