A festschrift, as defined by Merriam-Webster online, is "a volume of writings by different authors presented as a tribute or memorial especially to a scholar."  The writer fêted in the Verbivoracious flagship festschrift was a scholar who also happened to be one of the most innovative writers of the 20th century (and certainly for the first decade of the 21st century).  This collection contains essays, homages, and stories inspired by the work of Christine Brooke-Rose, arranged in the publication order of her books, commencing with the poem Gold (reprinted for the first time here), and concluding with Life, End of.  The writers featured are an eclectic mix1 of critics, storytellers, ardent readers, academics, pasticheurs, homageurs, and people coerced to read the works of Christine Brooke-Rose for the sole purpose of contributing to this festschrift.  Those not yet acquainted with her work should find sufficient entry points to her varying, often complex, sometimes cryptic, always playful, methods.  Unswerving converts to her constraints will find many rapturous moments in the numerous flawlessly executed fictions included.

Verbivoracious Festschrift Volume One

Literature & Fiction

BROOKE-ROSE, Christine

Literary

VerbivoraciousPress

Verbivoracious Press publishes a triannual festschrift celebrating the work of lesser-known European writers. The flagship issue fêtes Christine Brooke-Rose, one of the most innovative voices of the twentieth century, whose fiction plays challenging games with form and structure, using grammatical constraints, multiple languages, and a dicing of genre styles and theoretical discourses as an integral component of her novels. Brooke-Rose is among an unfortunate revue of writers whose work is fading out of print, rarely part of critical or academic discussion. This issue contains creative responses to her fiction and criticism, written with an eye to the general literary reader unfamiliar with her output, but with enough homage, parody, imitation, and criticism to excite her devoted fan base. Among the contents: a detailed essay on her writing constraints and illustrative examples of her complex techniques, alongside short stories, critical essays, and assorted unclassifiable pieces in thrall to her many modes. This issue also contains rare material by Brooke-Rose herself, including a re-print of her first-ever publication, the long poem Gold.

Verbivoracious Festschrift Volume One: Christine Brooke-Rose

Essays & Correspondence

Knut

Mallin, Tom

Humor & Satire

First published in 1970, this collection of eleven stories showcases Brooke-Rose's innovative credentials at their zenith. 'The Foot' and the 'The Religious Button' deploy to stunning effect her unique evolution of the run-on first person camera-eye narrative style as pioneered by Robbe-Grillet in the nouveau roman movement; 'Small Loser and Medium Winner' is a multilingual mix of allusions and discourses in the style of her 1968 novel Between; while 'Troglodyte' and 'The Chinese Bedspread' offer a more straightforward comic and realist approach. Go When You See the Green Man Walking is a dark, challenging, often science-fictional, frequently droll and sublimely erudite selection of stories from one of the unsung heroes of exploratory fiction.

Go When You See the Green Man Walking

The centrepiece of Brooke-Rose's Intercom Quartet, Xorandor and Verbivore explore the shifting language of technologies and their catastrophic potential. In Xorandor we meet Jip and Zab, two precocious teens who chance upon a stone claiming to have fallen from Mars, whose skill for absorbing language from multiple frequencies leads him to Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth with potentially apocalyptic consequences. Verbivore meets Jip and Zab again as adults, taking on a new crisis: the world's mega-computers, facing an overflow of information, rebel by eating up words and causing havoc among corporations, institutions, and governments. Both novels are rich in Brooke-Rose's characteristic wordplay, flair for the multilingual pun, and use science-fiction tropes in a stimulating and witty manner, making these two of the most engaging and vital novels of her career and a perfect entry point for the new reader. This reprint edition includes an introduction by Nicolas Tredell, consultant editor for Palgrave MacMillan's Readers' Guides.

Xorandor/Verbivore

A monument to our insatiable verbivoracity, The Syllabus is an act of humble genuflection before the authors responsible for those texts which have transported us to the peak of readerly nirvana and back. The texts featured, chosen in a rapturous frenzy by editors and contributors alike, represent a broad sweep of the most important exploratory fiction written in the last hundred years (and beyond). Featuring 100 texts from (fewer than) 100 contributors, The Syllabus is a form of religious creed, and should be read primarily as a holy manual from which the reader draws inspiration and hope, helping to shape their intellectual and moral life with greater awareness, and lead them towards those works that offer deep spiritual succour while surviving on a merciless and unkind planet. Readers of this festschrift should expect nothing less than an incontrovertible conversion from reader to insatiable verbivore in 225 pages.  "The Syllabus, as a third volume of Verbivoracious Festschrift, is a celebration of reading. It's a great literary feast for the true readers, for all the verbivores around the world, a feast consisting of hundred delicious meals. I am honored to be a part of that unforgettable menu." - Dubravka Ugrešić.

Verbivoracious Festschrift Volume Three: The Syllabus

Completed in 1962, first published in 1972, Tom Mallin's third novel Erowina is an encyclopaedic portrait of the titular troubled heroine, whose traumatic experiences in childhood and adolescence are transformed in adulthood into self-hatred and wild abandonment to erotic and sadomasochistic activities, ending with her suicide at thirty-six. Over twenty chapters, Erowina utilises a stunning range of styles and forms, from an autopsy report, confessional stream-of-consciousness, theological conversations, surreal symbolical stories, third-person accounts, scenes in dialogue riddled with puns and wordplays, short plays, copious lists, and sections with newspaper headlines, sealing the novel's indebtedness and homage to Joyce's Ulysses. A dark, ambitious, stimulating, and challenging novel, Erowina is Tom Mallin's masterpiece, and a work that remains surprising, fresh and vital.

Erowina

Set against a backdrop of public scandal and private dilemma, Mirrors on which dust has fallen presents the quotidian concerns of the average and the not-so-average inhabitants of the fictitious Bowmount, the province featured in Bursey's precursor Verbatim: A Novel. The varied cast of characters examine and defend their spiritual beliefs, from God to evolution; their views on art, as painting battles photography for supremacy; and their sexuality, from confusion to pagan flagrancy. While Verbatim depicts the politics of the elected, Mirrors on which dust has fallen reveals the motives of the electorate, using pitch-perfect dialogue interjected with sly media snippets and elegant, subtle prose, to paint a darkly humorous and deeply telling tale of the late twentieth century in Canada. “The writing is bawdy, heady, profane, often funny, and full of energy. Fans of Bursey’s distinctive first publication, Verbatim: A Novel, will be pleased, as will readers in search of something punchy and new-fangled.” — Joan Sullivan, The Telegram “Mirrors on which dust has fallen [is] an explosively unconventional, deeply disturbing, and relentlessly original work. . . . He is equally comfortable writing about the logistics of clothing wholesalers and the challenges of running a small radio station as he is about the quotidian detail of Catholic ceremonies and the grit needed to keep a seedy pub afloat.” — Mark Sampson, Numero Cinq “I felt like I was looking at swarming bacteria in a petri dish, everything felt so up close and I was so deep into it. I had to put the book down in order to gain sufficient distance to see the relationships of everyone intertwined in this microcosm, to feel the outlines of the story again. . . . It’s a really unique and unusual novel, quite unlike anything else I’ve read.” — Victoria Best, Litlove: Tales from the Reading Room

Mirrors on which dust has fallen

Bursey, Jeff

Rikki Ducornet is a magical surrealist, postmodern fabulist, multi-talented artist and poet, and author of several novels ripe with epicurean vocabulary, vivid and outrageous imagery, fantastically arcane trivia and erudition, and Rabelaisian re-imaginings of history, among them the Carteresque hellfire of The Stain, the Lewis Carroll homage and wonder-of-wonders The Jade Cabinet, and the beautiful, slowly unfurling heart-attack, Netsuke. Across her career, spanning four decades, Ducornet has pursued her inexhaustible obsession with Eros, the violence of the Marquis de Sade and other monsters, and the enchantment of the wunderkammern. The fourth VP festschrift, including critical essays, personal memoirs, fiction homages, and two in-depth interviews, explores Ducornet's passions and obsessions, with particular attention to her novels, illuminating the unforgettable work of a "linguistically explosive" author whose "vocabulary sweats with a kind of lyrical heat" (NY Times). CONTRIBUTORS: Forrest Aguirre, Ricco Barbels, Mary Caponegro, Robert Coover, Rikki Ducornet, Tammy Dasti, Michael J. Emmons, Brian Evenson, Allan Guttmann, Randall Heath, Lily Hoang, Joanna Howard, Laird Hunt, Carolyn Kuebler, Nadine Mainold, Steven Moore, Warren Motte, Tod Rise, Michelle Ryan-Sautour, Eleni Sikelianos, Raymond L. Williams, and Igo Wodan. "For those who know her, Rikki Ducornet's very name signifies enchantment and her works induce a state of rapture." -- Michael Silverblatt, KCRW Bookworm "The Complete Butcher's Tales is one of my all-time favorite books, but I love Rikki Ducornet's entire body of work. This festschrift, this wonderful book, is above all a place to think about Rikki -- to shine a bright, grateful light on her Vision. The contributors have done a miraculous job celebrating the work of an unspeakably beautiful, significant artist, thinker, and friend." --Kate Bernheimer, author of Horse, Flower, Bird

Verbivoracious Festschrift Volume 4: Rikki Ducornet

The Utopian consists of two intertwined storylines unfolding in two radically different settings. First, the story of Mesmer, who in 2411 sets out on his Journey, a rite of passage which is to last a year and a day, in a gloriously pansexual, matriarchal, and feminist utopia, told in the third person by a gentle and guileless narrator. The second storyline is set in Britain in 1979 and concerns Dr. Reed, a patriarchal and self-obsessed psychoanalyst, and his analysand, a young man called Mesmer Partridge, told in the first person by Reed in the voice of a spoilt, sarcastic, hostile curmudgeon. The two narratives entertain a complex, twisting relationship to one another, moving in all kinds of configuration, in which they intermittently appear to parallel, oppose, double, and subvert one another. Michael Westlake’s novel, first published in 1989, is thematically rich, weaving theories of politics, psychoanalysis, and feminism together in stylish and dazzlingly imaginative prose. Contains a new introduction from Toril Moi and an afterword from Andrew Collier.  “Mesmerizing in its brilliance and suggestion, The Utopian is a text we do not really know how to read. It confirms that Westlake is the most interesting novelist writing in England today.” Antony Easthope, Textual Practice

The Utopian

Westlake, Michael

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