{"title":"Art and Literary Works","description":"","products":[{"product_id":"what-is-art","title":"What Is Art?","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eWhat Is Art?\u003c\/em\u003e is the forty-eighth volume in the \u003cem\u003eJournal of Experimental Fiction\u003c\/em\u003e series, a scripto-visual book in which Norman Conquest treats the title question not as something to answer but as something to assemble.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eJames Hugunin, in the publisher description, reads it as \u003cem\u003ea hilarious scripto-visual Dadaist-Derridean quest to solve the impossible question, 'What is Art?'\u003c\/em\u003e using, ironically, anti-art strategies — \u003cem\u003eappropriation, violation, bad puns, found objects, offensive imagery, collage, and re-cycled past works culled from his own repertoire.\u003c\/em\u003e Conquest, per Hugunin, uses the book as a literal potboiler, chopping up and dumping in his ingredients to \u003cem\u003esimmer over the nature of creative intervention in our wacky (both cruel and comic) world.\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eConquest is a verbo-visual prankster and the founder and editor of Black Scat Books. JEF also publishes his \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/products\/mofa-the-museum-of-fungible-art\"\u003eMOFA: The Museum of Fungible Art\u003c\/a\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Norman Conquest","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39350596436125,"sku":null,"price":17.5,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/products\/what-is-art.png?v=1641450562"},{"product_id":"science-fiction-a-poem","title":"Science Fiction: A Poem!","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eScience Fiction: A Poem!\u003c\/em\u003e is a book-length poem. The unreliable narrator lashes out against aliens, America, and what Martin Ott called \"closer enemies of the mind and heart,\" a list that doubles as the poem's catalogue of grief. It is not science fiction in the genre sense. The register shifts constantly across its lines: lament, accusation, joke, prayer, tirade. Ott read it as \"a love poem disguised as a hate poem,\" and that reading is the right one to start from. The variation is the method, not a side effect of it. The engine is rhythm rather than narrative, and what recurs is voice.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Robin Wyatt Dunn","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39350596468893,"sku":null,"price":12.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/products\/science-fiction-a-poem.png?v=1641450697"},{"product_id":"afterimage-critical-essays-on-photography","title":"Afterimage: Critical Essays on Photography","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eAfterimage: Critical Essays on Photography\u003c\/em\u003e gathers the essays James R. Hugunin published in the journal \u003cem\u003eAfterimage\u003c\/em\u003e between 1977 and 1988. It was issued as volume 70 in the Journal of Experimental Fiction series in 2016, the second of three JEF books that consolidate Hugunin's photography criticism, alongside \u003cem\u003eWriting Pictures\u003c\/em\u003e and \u003cem\u003eWreck and Ruin\u003c\/em\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHugunin won the inaugural Reva and David Logan Award for Distinguished New Writing in the Field of Photography in 1983, co-sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts and Boston's Photographic Resource Center. He taught the History of Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1985 to 2018.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"James R. 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The book reads ruins, wreckage, and entropy as a way of thinking about how images hold time still.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt sits as the single-thesis counterpart to Hugunin's two essay anthologies for the press, \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/products\/afterimage-critical-essays-on-photography\"\u003eAfterimage\u003c\/a\u003e and \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/products\/writing-pictures-case-studies-in-photographic-criticism-1983-2012\"\u003eWriting Pictures\u003c\/a\u003e. Where those gather the breadth of his criticism over decades, this one narrows to a single subject and presses it until photography itself is asked to account for how time fails to stand still.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"James R. Hugunin","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39350597779613,"sku":null,"price":65.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/products\/wreck-and-ruin-photography-temporality-and-world-disorder.png?v=1641450631"},{"product_id":"writing-pictures-case-studies-in-photographic-criticism-1983-2012","title":"Writing Pictures: Case Studies in Photographic Criticism 1983-2012","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eWriting Pictures: Case Studies in Photographic Criticism 1983–2012\u003c\/em\u003e (2013) gathers thirty years of James R. Hugunin's photographic art criticism into one volume. It opens in the year he was named the first recipient of the Reva and David Logan Award for Distinguished New Writing in Photography, jointly funded by Boston's Photographic Resource Center and the National Endowment for the Arts.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOpening with an introduction by Hugunin himself, the case studies collected here run from that year forward: close readings of individual photographers and bodies of work, illustrated throughout with photographs by contemporary makers, written in the post-structuralist critical lineage Hugunin carried out of \u003cem\u003eAfterimage\u003c\/em\u003e and \u003cem\u003eArtweek\u003c\/em\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt sits with Hugunin's other criticism for the press, \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/products\/afterimage-critical-essays-on-photography\"\u003eAfterimage\u003c\/a\u003e and \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/products\/wreck-and-ruin-photography-temporality-and-world-disorder\"\u003eWreck and Ruin\u003c\/a\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"James R. Hugunin","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39350597943453,"sku":null,"price":85.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/products\/writing-pictures-case-studies-in-photographic-criticism-1983-2012.png?v=1641450605"},{"product_id":"claim-to-oblivion-selected-essays-and-interviews","title":"Claim to Oblivion: Selected Essays and Interviews","description":"\u003cp\u003eThis is where Tarnawsky explains himself in his own prose, the closest thing he wrote to a statement of method.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe pieces open onto specific puzzles. Who is the boy at the start of Bergman's \u003cem\u003ePersona\u003c\/em\u003e? What are the near-silent seven minutes at the end of Antonioni's \u003cem\u003eL'Eclisse\u003c\/em\u003e for? What happens if you break the rules Shklovsky thought prose was built on, or rewrite \u003cem\u003eThe Great Gatsby\u003c\/em\u003e in ultra-short sentences? He turns the same scrutiny on his own work, the 450-page \"joke of a book\" \u003cem\u003eThree Blondes and Death\u003c\/em\u003e, more than twenty years in the making, and \u003cem\u003eModus Tollens\u003c\/em\u003e, the collection he calls heuristic poetry. Across the interviews the recurring frame is the one he gave the Collidescope: \"Writing for me is akin to proving a theorem, the goal is to do it, and do it as elegantly as possible.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eRead alongside the fiction, that line is the operating principle of the catalogue. For anyone working through the mininovels, including the \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/products\/like-blood-in-water-five-mininovels-the-placebo-effect-trilogy-1\"\u003ePlacebo Effect Trilogy\u003c\/a\u003e, it is the author's own account of why the prose leaves so much out.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Yuriy Tarnawsky","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39350598041757,"sku":null,"price":17.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/products\/claim-to-oblivion-selected-essays-and-interviews.png?v=1641450657"},{"product_id":"recto-and-verso-a-work-of-asemism-and-pareidolia","title":"Recto \u0026 Verso: A Work of Asemism and Pareidolia","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eRecto \u0026amp; Verso: A Work of Asemism and Pareidolia\u003c\/em\u003e is the one title in Dominic Ward's JEF shelf that is not a novel. It is a full-color collection of asemic and pareidolic images, co-authored with Eckhard Gerdes, and the press classifies it as an art and literary work rather than fiction. Asemic writing is mark-making that has the shape of script without fixed meaning; pareidolia is the mind's habit of finding faces and figures in random pattern. The book lives in the seam between the two.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWard is an Australian novelist and visual artist based in Esk, Queensland. His JEF novels are \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/products\/prism-and-graded-monotony\"\u003ePrism and Graded Monotony\u003c\/a\u003e and \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/products\/the-hunter\"\u003eThe Hunter\u003c\/a\u003e; \u003cem\u003eRecto \u0026amp; Verso\u003c\/em\u003e is where his visual practice runs in parallel to the prose.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Dominic Ward","offers":[{"title":"Softcover","offer_id":48386477785245,"sku":null,"price":15.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"Hardcover","offer_id":48386480079005,"sku":null,"price":15.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/products\/recto-and-verso-a-work-of-asemism-and-pareidolia.png?v=1641450687"},{"product_id":"literary-yoga","title":"Literary Yoga","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eLiterary Yoga\u003c\/em\u003e is a craft book of one hundred writing exercises. The premise is in the title: what the gentle stretching on the yoga mat does for muscles and joints, these deliberately painful tasks do for the writing talents inside the writer. The exercises are meant to be returned to again, and again, and again.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTarnawsky framed his approach to writing, in a 2022 interview with \u003cem\u003eThe Collidescope\u003c\/em\u003e, as \"akin to proving a theorem, the goal is to do it, and do it as elegantly as possible.\" The prompts share that temperament: formal, exacting, set up to make the writer work against a constraint and see what the constraint does.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBefore he was a novelist and poet, Tarnawsky spent thirty-six years at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center on machine translation. The exercises are the bench version of that cast of mind.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Yuriy Tarnawsky","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39350600892573,"sku":null,"price":16.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/products\/literary-yoga.png?v=1624834284"},{"product_id":"mofa-the-museum-of-fungible-art","title":"MOFA: The Museum of Fungible Art","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eMOFA: The Museum of Fungible Art\u003c\/em\u003e is a collection of verbo-visual gems from Norman Conquest, gathering parody, sound poetry, and absurdist visual imagery. The publisher description notes that the lavish edition includes two scarce early satirical works — \u003cem\u003eSartre's French Phrase Book\u003c\/em\u003e (1974) and \u003cem\u003eInteriors: A Book of Very Clean Rooms\u003c\/em\u003e (1985) — alongside material published here for the first time.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAlso inside is an excerpt from Conquest's parodic recasting of Akbar del Piombo's \u003cem\u003eFuzz Against Junk\u003c\/em\u003e, retitled \u003cem\u003eFuzz Against Smut\u003c\/em\u003e (later expanded into a full-length Black Scat title in 2024), surrealist riffs on the \u003cem\u003eNancy\u003c\/em\u003e comic strip, and sound poems.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eConquest is a verbo-visual prankster and the founder of the international anti-censorship art collective Beuyscouts of Amerika, as well as the founder and editor of Black Scat Books. JEF also publishes his \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/products\/what-is-art\"\u003eWhat Is Art?\u003c\/a\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Norman Conquest","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43538099175581,"sku":"","price":13.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/files\/FINALMOFACOVERF-Blowfi.png?v=1744373586"},{"product_id":"literary-diary-2020-2024","title":"Literary Diary 2020-2024","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eLiterary Diary 2020-2024\u003c\/em\u003e is the working journal Tarnawsky kept while composing his final dilogy, \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/products\/sebastian-in-a-dream\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eSebastian in a Dream\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e and \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/products\/the-burial-of-the-count-of-orgaz\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Burial of the Count of Orgaz\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e. It is not fiction. It is the record of the trials and the dead ends, the account of a writer reaching toward goals he had not yet defined.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIts real subject is method. The diary lays out the rules he devised for \u003cem\u003eSebastian in a Dream\u003c\/em\u003e, a text-based equivalent of the music-based rules of Bach's \u003cem\u003eGoldberg Variations\u003c\/em\u003e, thirty variations framed front and back by a single aria, and watches him test whether the system would hold over the length of a book. The dilogy braided that formal scheme with autobiographical material. Tarnawsky described his writing to \u003cem\u003eThe Collidescope\u003c\/em\u003e as \"akin to proving a theorem, the goal is to do it, and do it as elegantly as possible.\" This is the lab notebook for that proof.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe dilogy is the late work; the diary is the record of how it was built.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Yuriy Tarnawsky","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46097802526877,"sku":"","price":19.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/files\/DIARYcoverfinal_1.png?v=1744373583"},{"product_id":"academe-grove-interviews-2017-2023","title":"Academe Grove: Interviews 2017-2023","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eAcademe Grove: Interviews 2017-2023\u003c\/em\u003e gathers eleven interviews Yuriy Tarnawsky gave between 2017 and 2023. It is a book of talk, not fiction, and pairs with his \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/products\/literary-diary-2020-2024\"\u003eLiterary Diary 2020-2024\u003c\/a\u003e: where the diary records his private method, the interviews are the public account of the same working years.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTarnawsky was an unusually articulate explainer of his own practice. Across these eleven conversations he returns to the idea that organized his late fiction, that writing for him was akin to proving a theorem, to be done and done as elegantly as possible. The interview years are also the composition years of his final dilogy, \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/products\/sebastian-in-a-dream\"\u003eSebastian in a Dream\u003c\/a\u003e and \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/products\/the-burial-of-the-count-of-orgaz\"\u003eThe Burial of the Count of Orgaz\u003c\/a\u003e, so the talk and the work were running in parallel.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Yuriy Tarnawsky","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46813551100061,"sku":"","price":15.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/files\/ACADEMEGROVECOVERf.png?v=1748191706"},{"product_id":"lifers-a-micro-novel","title":"Lifers: A micro-novel","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eLifers: A micro-novel\u003c\/em\u003e is the short prose work JEF distributes under the byline Jeffrey Scott Weisman. It uses incarceration as a metaphorical framework, asking how individual human nature shapes the course of a life — the prison frame doing in compressed form the work a longer book would spread across chapters.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe byline here is the more formal version of the name Weisman prints on his JEF series novel, the absurdist Trump-era allegory \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/products\/the-greatest-place-on-earth-personal-note-a-work-of-absurdity\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Greatest Place on Earth\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e (\u003cem\u003eJournal of Experimental Fiction\u003c\/em\u003e vol. 91, 2021). \u003cem\u003eLifers\u003c\/em\u003e runs alongside that novel as the shorter test of the same writer's interest in confinement and selfhood.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Jeff Weisman","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47527633682589,"sku":null,"price":17.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/files\/LifersFinalCoverFrontOnly_269d7446-7d0f-4a62-9e19-179599c7b02d.png?v=1767400295"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/collections\/art-and-literary-works\/art-and-literary-work.oembed","provider":"The Journal of Experimental Fiction","version":"1.0","type":"link"}