Lionel Endenberry

The Max Kleinman Reader Lionel Endenberry First edition

Is The Max Kleinman Reader the funniest book of the 21st Century? Or does it mark the discovery of a dazzling American poet? Kleinman is a skid-row genius who from 1946 to 1999 produced 30.000 poems, most of them wrapped around his singular obsessions with fallen nuns, shrapnel wounds, Western philosophy, cheap wine, and All-Star Wrestling. The Max Kleinman Reader features the best of these poems, along with a cryptic autobiography, a bizarre interview, and a handful of unsettling photographs. But does Max Kleinman really exist? Or is he the twisted invention of freelance scholar Lionel Endenberry? Endenberry claims to have found a shoebox containing all these documents in a garage sale in Van Nuys, California. He exults at having "discovered a soon-to-be notable literary figure," and calls Kleinman a poet of "enormous versatility and vigor." But after months of searching for further evidence of the shadowy genius's existence, he claims to have found not a trace. Atomic Drop Press doesn't pretend to have the answers to any of these questions. All we know is that The Max Kleinman Reader is one of the strangest and funniest books we've ever seen.