A room in the house of JEF

Authors Eckhard Gerdes

Eckhard Gerdes

1959 ·

Eckhard Gerdes founded The Journal of Experimental Fiction in 1986. JEF Books published his 733-page magnum opus, The Chronicles of Michel du Jabot (2022).

The shelf

18 titles , published 2001 – 2023.

18 titles · 2001 – 2023 · all in print

The bio

On Eckhard Gerdes.

Eckhard Gerdes (b. 1959, Atlanta) is a novelist, editor, and publisher who in 1986 founded both Depth Charge Press and The Journal of Experimental Fiction, the two projects that later merged under the JEF Books imprint. The journal was named by his wife Persis: "just call it what it is."

He holds a B.A. in English from the University of Dubuque, an M.A. in English from Roosevelt University, and an M.F.A. in Fiction Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He teaches English at Elgin Community College and has taught at DePaul University, Waubonsee Community College, and Indiana University Northwest.

His novels and novellas have appeared from Raw Dog Screaming, Red Hen, Fugue State, Civil Coping Mechanisms, Black Scat Books, and JEF Books, among others. Hugh Moore (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2010; reissued Heroinum, 2015) won the &NOW Award for Innovative Writing; Lance Olsen called it "funny, mischievous, riotously re-Joycean." Other novels include Przewalski's Horse (Red Hen, 2006), The Million-Year Centipede (Raw Dog Screaming, 2007), My Landlady the Lobotomist (Raw Dog Screaming, 2008; top-five finisher in the 2009 Preditors and Editors Readers Poll), Cistern Tawdry (Fugue State, 2002), White Bungalows (Dirt Heart Pharmacy, 2015), Marco & Iarlaith (Black Scat, 2018), and The Pissers' Theatre (Black Scat, 2021).

His magnum opus, The Chronicles of Michel du Jabot (JEF Books, 2022), is a 733-page novel composed by hand over roughly a decade. Alain Arias-Misson wrote of it: "this, not Finnegans Wake, is the novel to end the novel."

As editor he has produced JEF's signature Festschrift volumes honoring Raymond Federman, John Barth, and Harold Jaffe, gathering contributions from Ronald Sukenick, Charles Bernstein, Larry McCaffery, Lance Olsen, Mark Amerika, and others. He befriended Miriam Patchen at the 1989 Kenneth Patchen Conference in Trumbull County, Ohio; that relationship became the seed of the Kenneth Patchen Award for the Innovative Novel, which JEF revived in 2012 and administers annually.

He lives in the Chicago area with three children and six grandchildren. Start with Hugh Moore.

From the editor

The press began in 1986 because the gap between what I wanted to read and what the major houses were publishing had stopped being a soft refusal and become a structural one. I started a press. Persis named the journal. She said I should just call it what it is, and so the name has been The Journal of Experimental Fiction for forty years and it has had to be true. The editorial method has not changed in that time. I read every manuscript slowly, and I ask one question: would the press regret publishing this book, and would the writer regret having waited for someone else to publish it. If the answer to both is no, we do the book. Of my own work, Hugh Moore (2010, with Miriam Patchen's preface) is the most direct entry. The Chronicles of Michel du Jabot (2022) is what ten years of writing through and after the loss of Persis produced. The catalogue assembles itself one book at a time. It still does.

Eckhard Gerdes · founding editor, JEF

Elsewhere on record

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Only Eckhard Gerdes, of all people on the face of this planet, could have written this work.

— Eckhard Gerdes