An utterly unique collection composed by the award-winning poet and writer, a global anthology of pieces from lesser-known classics by luminaries like Franz Kafka, Samuel R. Delany, and Gwendolyn Brooks to up-and-coming writers that examine pathos and feeling, giving a well-timed rehab to the word 'pathetic' 'Literature is pathetic.' So claims Eileen Myles in their provocative and robust introduction to Pathetic Literature, a breathtaking mishmash of pieces ranging from poems to theater scripts to prose to anything in between, all exploring the so-called 'pathetic' or awkwardly-felt moments and revelations around which lives are both built and undone. Myles first reclaimed the word for a seminar they taught at the University of California San Diego in the early 2000s, rescuing it from the derision into which it had slipped and restoring its original meaning of inspiring emotion or feeling, from the Ancient Greek rhetorical method pathos. Their identification of 'pathetic' as ripe for