In Distance No Object, Gloria Frym turns her ironic, passionate gaze to post-Vietnam Berkeley and San Francisco. Private lives are still swept along by the currents of history, as in the sixties. But the names of the wars have changed…the bombs fall on Iraq, and "the war on poverty" becomes a war against the poor. The stories of Distance No Object evoke the deep frustrations between generations, friends, neighbors, and races. Yet civility, quotidian justice, a common language, and new love are imagined…and Kafka finds his true bride.
"Frym turns an unflinching eye on human interaction, capturing casual and intimate exchanges between strangers on trains, estranged husbands and wives, and errant children and their parents in this sensitive and assured collection…Frym focuses on sensitive social issues…her politically charged narratives are among her best."—Publishers Weekly
"…a collection that is possibly ahead of its time while it masquerades as an elegy for an end to an era."—Austin Chronicle
"Quiet and moving in their intensity of feeling."—Kirkus Reviews
"Put Gloria Frym's splendidly knowing vision of the urban with Grace Paley's and Stephen Dixon's. Her voice is tender, searching, and ever so slightly insolent—you greet these stories like friends stopping by unannounced, friends so beguiling that you wish they'd stay longer than they do."—Jonathan Lethem, author of Gun, with Occasional Music and Amnesia Moon
"Gloria Frym's stories strike me as going directly to the heart in a rational way. They hurt by being clear and reasonable—like William Carlos Williams' poetry, say. But hurt doesn't mean hurt, exactly; it means affected in a necessary way."—Alice Notley, author of Mysteries of Small Houses
Gloria Frym is no stranger to the literary scene, having been a writer and teacher for over two decades. She attended the University of New Mexico under the tutelage of poet Robert Creeley. "Creeley had quite a bit of national acclaim by that time," says Frym, "but I didn't know it. I just knew he was important to me and his presence brought a lot of important writers—Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Denise Levertov, and others—to what was essentially an outpost on Route 66." Gloria Frym is the author of a previous collection of short stories, How I Learned, as well as several volumes of poetry, including By Ear, Back to Forth, Impossible Affection, and the forthcoming Homeless at Home. She is also the author of a book of interviews, Second Stories: Conversations with Women Artists. Since 1987, she has been a member of the core faculty of the Poetics Program at New College in San Francisco.

Distance No Object: Stories

Literature & Fiction

Frym, Gloria

United States

City Lights Publishers

Are we defined by the first chapter of our lives. Destined to stagnate? Certainly not! Second Stories gives factual accounts of how women overcome adversity and keep evolving. Inspirational.

Second Stories

Chronicle Books+

Poetry. HOMELESS AT HOME is a series of letters addressed to a deceased father whose life was shattered and fragmented by war, loss, and economic instability, and further splintered by generational strife and estrangement. With an emotionally complex voice that intercuts global events and personal history, these letters strive to speak with the father, to bring him up to date with "current" events and with the poetic life of the speaker. "Gloria Frym's HOMELESS AT HOME is an elevated triumph. A deeply moving, astutely passionate work of the highest integrity and poetic presence. These poems not only grieve the past that was and can never be, but focus with alacrity on present states of debris and possibility. Their measured rage and acceptance unfold a stately and alarming poetry, understated yet overt, compassionate yet resistant. A deeply intelligent work of profound demand and reward from a writer of immense principle and engagement" - David Meltzer.

Homeless at Home

Poetry

Creative Arts Book Company

Back to Forth

The Figures

Poetry. A new book of poems and prose poems by the author of HOMELESS AT HOME, DISTANCE NO OBJECT and HOW I LEARNED. "This poet's brilliant solution in SOLUTION SIMULACRA is to invent a parallel and much more exciting ethos to the prevailing ill winds of a culture gone awry with war and little tolerance for dissent. Poetry, prose poems, polemic exist in a polyvalent, quotidian, urgent universe. Gloria Frym is the patriot I'll vote for, every time"--Anne Waldman. "Like in the aftermath of a 'mesmerizing theater of operations,' Gloria Frym's solutions tread the water of a flood inundating what we once considered our life. Angry, playful, and unforgiving, these words we thought belonged to us now see only `orphans as far as the future can go.'"--Ammiel Alcalay.

Solution Simulacra

United Artists Books

The acclaimed poet's first collection of short stories illuminates worlds of the unfortunate and lives of the marginalized. "These fluid stories resonate with both internal and external dialogues in a variety of voices."--Publishers Weekly ¶"Frym deserves admiration from all discriminating fiction readers."--Booklist

How I Learned

Coffee House Press

Poetry. "How does the present imprint itself on language, on poetry? Gloria Frym's MIND OVER MATTER shows us that: the outlines of the endless wars, the credit default swaps. But it also shows poetry resisting this. 'No poem/would stand for such a line.' Frym writes. 'A poem is not a fool.' This book makes me want to cheer"—Rae Armantrout. "MIND OVER MATTER is a thoughtful meditation on poetry in our age of post-theory and reminds us that the authority of poetry has always been ours ('Without words we would fall on our faces'). Giving us 'all of summer in one word,' poetry is a form of 'living attention' It is our true home, bestows freedom in language, and understands best that 'now is as old as time.' I love this book for casting aside the postmodern clichés of poetry's limitation, preferring to see world and language in fresh relation. Here, the 'definite is infinite,' and the real resonates. Not the 'neo- / Looking out for numero uno,' largely inspired by poetry's professionalized culture, but a shrewd look at the actual and eternal worlds before us"—Paul Hoover.

Mind Over Matter: A Tribute to Poetry

BlazeVOX Books

Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. California Interest. Women's Studies. Art. "Gloria Frym has written a love story about how we read and why we read, and the way books invade our psyches and change our lives. Within these pages are her encounters with Proust and Flaubert and Dickinson and Whitman, and they are for her what the great cities of the world are to life-long travelers, dream destinations, whole worlds. Her lucid and wide ranging thoughts make for necessary reading now more than ever, because books Frym proves here can save us still."--Tom Barbash "HOW PROUST RUINED MY LIFE & OTHER ESSAYS by Gloria Frym--one of America's finest, most crucial poets and prose writers--is a treasure culled from a lifetime of reading widely, freely, carefully, with passion, intellect, and curiosity. Frym reads not for erudition or pedantry, but for the deep pleasure of entering another's created world. Her sphere of reading--which spans the work of San Francisco County Jail inmates to Proust, Emerson, Chekov, Flaubert, her dear friend Lucia Berlin, her teacher and mentor Robert Creeley, even the beloved Grimm Brothers (and this is just a short list)--is an ever-shifting prismatic globe where one arrives as Gulliver does, starved, shipwrecked along the shores of Jonathan Swift, grateful to be alive. These essays were written at different times in Frym's life, many presented at conferences, festivals, classrooms, yet they compose an immediate seamlessness in her calm, undisturbed, inviting prose, a translucency that brings us close to the act of reading as immersion. Frym reminds us that reading is correspondence, even friendship, an intimacy in which we are 'breathing deeply the oxygen of another writer.' I loved this book for its love, for its generosity, for at last delineating the differences between Niedecker and Dickinson, and for taking me back to reading sentence for sentence, word for word."--Gillian Conoley "In this wonderful assemblage of essays, Gloria Frym liberates the act of reading from the confines of the page. She leads us into the open air where the personal and the public intersect and create a new avenue of possibilities: the book in the hand, the world outside your window. Especially memorable are the probing essays on Jean Toomer and Lorine Niedecker, and her homage to David Meltzer. HOW PROUST RUINED MY LIFE is a timeless book and deserves a wide audience."--Lewis Warsh

How Proust Ruined My Life & Other Essays

Arts & Photography

Fueled by their highest ideals and delusions, the people in Gloria Frym’s The True Patriot suffer trivial, modest, and sometimes catastrophic failure when they try to change the world. Frym's signature humor and wit create a manic progression of language, as her parade of characters attempt to navigate the nightmarish landscape of 21st century America. The wars of American-making, abetting, and quelling are all part of the tableau. 
 Gloria Frym is a writer who specializes in the art of the aside, the slice of life, the sly thesis, and the telling parenthetical. She digresses with intent, for “No indecisive moment is insignificant.” The True Patriot, as much a collection of dispatches as stories, puns on the politics of everyday life to show us large, frightful and comic absurdities lurking in the quotidian. Sounding out surface emanations to show how indiscreet and porous the seams between categories are, she writes our scattered condition of incompletion and contingency. Picture a figure, part wry philosopher and part witty kid throwing a handful of rocks into a too-complacent lake. Causes sink, and we are left to contemplate their rippling effects. Everywhere these effects connect, their causes hidden, just as “one lie begets another.” How to excavate what is already above ground? Begin anywhere, and “be reborn on paper.” Miranda Mellis 
 Gloria Frym brings satire and sympathy to this earnest world ... with her poet’s eye for detail, Frym gives her stories just the right point on which to pivot. Frym can also stretch an allusion for comic effect ... she is at her best describing the subtle chaffing of social boundaries. San Francisco Chronicle 
 Frym addresse[s] the world’s problems with bemused critique, at once linguistically swerving and point-blank; if David Sedaris were a symbolist with a lyrical sensibility, he might write something like Frym’s Patriot. OmniVerse 
 Jonathan Lethem likens Frym’s vision to Grace Paley, who plays similar themes, and that comparison is just. Like Paley’s urbanites, some of Frym’s people suffer trivial, modest, and catastrophic failures fueled by their idealism and hope. Their projections intersect with their capabilities and provide the comedy and tragedy for their lives. [Her work] radiate[s] a clarity about what has become this culture’s constant predicament with maintaining a human face and human intimacy. The injustice and terror around Frym’s characters injures, intimidates, and baffles, but there are curiosities and victories and joys, too—her people have the courage to be in the world. Rain Taxi

The True Patriot

Spuyten Duyvil Publishing

The Stage Stop Motel

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