Godlike by Richard Hell (Launch & Reading)

Join us at e-flux on Tuesday, March 3, at 7pm to celebrate the re-issue of Godlike (New York Review of Books, 2026), with a reading by author Richard Hell. Books will be available for purchase, and a signing will follow the reading.

Based on Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine’s notorious affair, but set in the epochal downtown poetry scene of 1970s New York, Godlike is a tribute to poetry and the beauty and mess of art, desire, and New York City. The book takes us through Paul Vaughn’s 1997 hospital notebooks: diaries amidst poems and essays, most pertinently the poet’s third-person memoir-novelette of his youthful time with the now-famous R. T. Wode.

Godlike is infused with evocations—and sometimes actual poems—of many New York poets of the era, from Ted Berrigan and Ron Padgett to Edwin Denby and James Schuyler. It achieves a lyricism both profane and profound as it conjures the frenetic vitality as well as the existential malaise of an era. It’s a searching meditation on art, life, love, and the impossibility of everything.

Originally published in 2005, Godlike is newly reissued by NYRB Classics, featuring an introduction by Raymond Foye.

For more information, please contact [email protected].