The grandson of the Man Without Qualities living in New York City.

apostrophe/parenthesis: Journal of Experimental Fiction 33

Literature & Fiction

Kramer, Frederick Mark

Contemporary

JEF Books

Fiction. "The book's title, 'Return to Circa '96,' caught my attention right off. Themes of memory, time travel, and so forth were evoked. Then the visual appeal was quite marked (my professional and personal interests tilt in favor of scripto-visual works). The 'data-base aesthetics' (Lev Manovich) aspect of the work gave it a very contemporary Web 2.0 kind of technological relevance, which meshed well with the book's meta- fictional construction. These conceptual art-ish and surfictional elements lured me into the book. The library-as-a-framing-device, situating events within a repository of texts, hit a responsive chord given my own autodidactic / academic propensities. I felt at home in the text. The producer's mixtures of modalities of writing, a 'mulligan stew' of different textualities, were attributes of the kinds of works I read and re-read most often. Finally, the book was funny. It not only gave that 'writerly' jouissance touted by literary theorist Roland Barthes, but also the plaisir of a 'readerly' text. In short, in opening Mr. Sawatzki's book, it was as if I'd found a long-lost friend."—James R. Hugunin

Return to Circa ’96 (Journal of Experimental Fiction, 58)

Sawatzki, Bob

Fiction. "You can break many things, especially the fragile ones, but also feelings and concepts. In her novel Carolyn Chun touches on the subject of breaking the former two--a bottle and a glass fish--but even though she doesn't say it openly, the book is really about the latter--breaking a person's heart and the traditional form of the novel. HOW TO BREAK ARTICLE NOUN is a carefully crafted work consisting of seven parts, with seven chapters each, which are intricately interwoven to make up for the absence of a plot. 'I didn't want to have a love story until I found life to be an abiding romance with the world. I didn't want to write a love story until I found life to be an abiding romance with words,' the author tells the reader in the two-sentence Introduction. It is the love of words--language and the forms it may take on--that shapes this elegantly presented story of the breakup of a relationship. The reader is told that this is what the book is about on the very first line with the words 'Can you close the door and sit down? Something bad,' which are repeated throughout the book many times like sequences in a Resnais movie. In addition to influences from film, Chun brings into her novel such diverse elements as pictures, terms and formulas from physics, botanical names, Latin words, poetry, and even an essay; all of this while documenting a touching and psychologically convincing case study of two people growing apart. HOW TO BREAK ARTICLE NOUN was chosen as the winner of the Kenneth Patchen Innovative Fiction Award over a number of worthy candidates for the exceptional craft and originality with which it is written as well as for an insightful and precisely rendered depiction of a crisis in the life of two human beings."--Yuriy Tarnawsky

How to Break Article Noun: Journal of Experimental Fiction 46

Carolyn Chun

Fiction. The themes of alienation, abandonment, and fear of death that permeate THE FUTURE OF GIRAFFES and THE VIEW OF DELFT, second and third books of The Placebo Effect Trilogy, are originally brought up in the first book, LIKE BLOOD IN WATER. A man accidentally wanders into a session similar to Primal Scream therapy and devotes his life to screaming from then on. A pianist stops playing because he feels his right hand isn't there. A father searches for a bible and eats toothpaste in anticipation of his daughter's drowning at a seaside resort called Penal Port. A Luciano Pavarotti look-alike agrees to be killed in a reenactment of the murder of Agamemnon. And a man dresses up in a mountain climber's outfit as he goes in for a surgery procedure he has been trying to avoid at all cost.The five mininovels that make up LIKE BLOOD IN WATER, as with its two companions, all employ negative text—gaps of vital information which the reader is obliged to supply himself. By bringing personal experience into the story, the reader makes it more vivid and real, becoming in the process its co-author together with the author of the text.

Like Blood in Water: Five Mininovels (The Placebo Effect Trilogy #1) (Journal of Experimental Fiction)

Tarnawsky, Yuriy

Literary

Fiction. "Jaffe is an outrigger, sailing the deeply troubled waters of our social and sexual psyches, risking much, but, with courage and persistence, staying afloat and returning to tell the tale, which in this instance is his remarkable Othello Blues, with its brilliant characterizations, dialect, knowledge of the blues, and deep understanding of Shakespeare's Othello."&mdash;Kenneth Bernard "Nobody does what Jaffe can do. There are just pale imitations."&mdash;Derek Pell

Othello Blues (Journal of Experimental Fiction)

Jaffe, Harold

Fiction. "'Get it up!' demands the narrator of Frederick Mark Kramer's new novel, AMBIGUITY, of himself as he lies down to rest, as if his sexual energy could save him. However, for Kramer's narrator, Darko, sexual energy alone, although it abounds in Darko's memory, cannot save him. This is a novel about breath, or, as Darko calls it, 'the pneuma.' Darko says that 'the pneuma can mean the breath of life or the destruction of life,' and in between is where this novel takes place. Clearly Darko uses his entire life as his inspiration here, 'inspiration' meaning 'breathing in.' Then Darko recounts this life in ten paragraphs that are gymnastic and acrobatic and celebrate corporeal existence. This is the 'perspiration,' or the 'breathing through' life that Darko has exercised. His ten paragraphs, though, are ten breaths, ten exhalations, leading to a final 'breathing out,' or 'expiration,' as he takes to his bed, exhausted, demanding of himself a new beginning, not just the release of orgasm, but the orgasmic seeding of new life, a creative re-fertilization of the world and the rebirth of oneself. As always, Kramer is both resolutely readable and profoundly resonant in his work. Those familiar with his masterful novel Apostrophe/Parenthesis will find in AMBIGUITY that Kramer has produced another masterpiece that rivals the best works of anyone."—Eckhard Gerdes

Ambiguity: Journal of Experimental Fiction 40

Each of Harold Jaffe's 13 docufictions features a well-known personage who either died of an overdose or was invested in "drugs" to the extent that they contributed to his/her death. Marilyn Monroe, Billie Holiday, Bela Lugosi, Aldous Huxley, Freud, Poe, Lead Belly, Sonny Liston, Diane Arbus, jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, and Abbie Hoffman are among those featured. High culture and pop. Dead and ghostly. The narrative dance that Jaffe performs with these apparitions is unexpected, intricate, melancholy, comical, brilliant in every register.

OD: docufictions: Journal of Experimental Fiction 45

Fiction. A Mockumental Work of the Imagination by J. A. Ellis, resident of Chicagary, Usonia. He is another Billy Pilgrim lost in a time of fascist violence and succession. TAR SPACKLED BANNER is a 21st-century time- traveler's autobiography that recalls Fyodor Dostoevsky's anti-heroic protagonist's raves in Notes from Underground and the curious esoterics of Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus. Ellis takes the reader on a scripto-visual journey into our near future where the Goosestep is even more popular than the Soupyi Shuffle.

Tar Spackled Banner (Journal of Experimental Fiction, 58)

Hugunin, James R

Treat yourself to a hot and hilarious lunch-served up by the author of ASSASSINATION RHAPSODY, the writer THE REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY FICTION hails as "the postmodern master of parody." This collection of satirical texts skewers and roasts every major work of classic and contemporary erotica, from the KAMA SUTRA to FIFTY SHADES OF GREY. John Strausbaugh in THE NEW YORK PRESS said "Pell's deft lampoons are like precision sniper fire." Novelist Robert Coover said "Derek Pell is a wordplay master and a parodist of great wit and cunning." D. Harlan Wilson calls NAKED LUNCH AT TIFFANY'S "...a true work of literature." Includes a shocking and inflammatory introduction by Nile Southern, author of THE CANDY MEN: THE ROLLICKING LIFE AND TIMES OF THE NOTORIOUS NOVEL CANDY. Curl up in bed with NAKED LUNCH AT TIFFANY'S and enjoy some seriously wicked fun.

Naked Lunch at Tiffany's: Erotic Classics Reimagined

Pell, Derek

Humor & Satire

Fiction. "Harold Jaffe is a master of the disembodied voice. These fictions — transgressive, political, dryly comic — are grounded in an ancient tradition, that of the speech of the storyteller. Interlocutors talk as if out of dark caves, and the result is a marvel of conversation that takes the reader to places somehow beyond the 'real world,' only to comment, often searingly, upon its absurdities. Each of Jaffe's volumes has been ground- breaking, and GOOSESTEP is no exception. This is a book of great mastery, some of the most inventive fiction of our time."—Toby Olson

Goosestep: fictions & docufictions (Journal of Experimental Fiction)

Short Stories & Anthologies

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