{"title":"Eckhard Gerdes","description":"\u003cp\u003eEckhard Gerdes (b. 1959, Atlanta) is a novelist, editor, and publisher who in 1986 founded both Depth Charge Press and \u003cem\u003eThe Journal of Experimental Fiction\u003c\/em\u003e, 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.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHe 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHis novels and novellas have appeared from Raw Dog Screaming, Red Hen, Fugue State, Civil Coping Mechanisms, Black Scat Books, and JEF Books, among others. \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/products\/hugh-moore\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eHugh Moore\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2010; reissued Heroinum, 2015) won the \u0026amp;NOW Award for Innovative Writing; Lance Olsen called it \"funny, mischievous, riotously re-Joycean.\" Other novels include \u003cem\u003ePrzewalski's Horse\u003c\/em\u003e (Red Hen, 2006), \u003cem\u003eThe Million-Year Centipede\u003c\/em\u003e (Raw Dog Screaming, 2007), \u003cem\u003eMy Landlady the Lobotomist\u003c\/em\u003e (Raw Dog Screaming, 2008; top-five finisher in the 2009 Preditors and Editors Readers Poll), \u003cem\u003eCistern Tawdry\u003c\/em\u003e (Fugue State, 2002), \u003cem\u003eWhite Bungalows\u003c\/em\u003e (Dirt Heart Pharmacy, 2015), \u003cem\u003eMarco \u0026amp; Iarlaith\u003c\/em\u003e (Black Scat, 2018), and \u003cem\u003eThe Pissers' Theatre\u003c\/em\u003e (Black Scat, 2021).\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHis magnum opus, \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/products\/the-chronicles-of-michel-du-jabot\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Chronicles of Michel du Jabot\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e (JEF Books, 2022), is a 733-page novel composed by hand over roughly a decade. Alain Arias-Misson wrote of it: \"this, not \u003cem\u003eFinnegans Wake\u003c\/em\u003e, is the novel to end the novel.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAs 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHe lives in the Chicago area with three children and six grandchildren. Start with \u003cem\u003eHugh Moore\u003c\/em\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"ring-in-a-river","title":"Ring in a River","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eRing in a River\u003c\/em\u003e drops a newly disenfranchised Iowa philosophy professor into Austin, Texas, in April 1962, and follows him into a life of jazz, ornithology, madness, and self-redefinition. It is one of Eckhard Gerdes's early novels, published in 1992 under Depth Charge Press, the imprint he founded in 1986 and hand-assembled in its first years.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGerdes describes his technique plainly as \"how I think\": prose that disregards conventional time, space, and causality to follow a character through fear toward something past it. The book is more concerned with the motion of a mind than with a plot in the conventional sense, and the looseness is the method, not its by-product.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Eckhard Gerdes","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39350596567197,"sku":"","price":9.94,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/products\/ring-in-a-river.png?v=1641450690"},{"product_id":"offbeat-quirky","title":"Offbeat\/Quirky","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eOffbeat\/Quirky\u003c\/em\u003e is the seventy-third issue of the Journal of Experimental Fiction and the first book of the Offbeat\/Quirky Books imprint, a thematic anthology edited by Eckhard Gerdes. Forty-six contemporary voices gather under the theme that names the volume: writers off the realist grid by temperament rather than program.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe roster runs from Alec S. Scott and Arnold Skemer through Carolyn Chun, Denis Emorine, Jane L. Carman, Jim Meirose, Norman Conquest, Thaddeus Rutkowski, and Peter Wortsman, ordered, as Gerdes notes in the introduction, \"in quite Midwestern fashion, in the order of their first names.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt is the fifty-seventh book the press has published counting the three proto-JEF titles before the \u003cem\u003eJournal of Experimental Fiction\u003c\/em\u003e name was adopted in 2001 (the JEF series numbering reserves some slots, so the issue count runs ahead of the physical book count). Gerdes uses the introduction to mark a shift in posture. The name \u003cem\u003eJournal of Experimental Fiction\u003c\/em\u003e, he writes, is accurate but \"perhaps a trifle academic\"; he does not want readers to take the press as \"part of an insular community that only feeds off of academe.\" The new imprint name carries a wider mandate. Daniel Borzutzky, later a National Book Award winner for poetry, first appeared in JEF's pages in \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/products\/belighted-fiction\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eBelighted Fiction\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e alongside the story writer Amina Memory Cain.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGerdes's measure of the work, repeated in his introduction: \"the measure of great work is if the creator can look at the work when it is complete and say to herself or himself, 'Only I, of all people on the face of this planet, could have written this work.'\"\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Eckhard Gerdes","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39350598205597,"sku":null,"price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/products\/offbeat-quirky.png?v=1641450515"},{"product_id":"belighted-fiction","title":"Belighted Fiction","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eBelighted Fiction\u003c\/em\u003e is the fourth issue of the Journal of Experimental Fiction, edited by Eckhard Gerdes. The title states the editorial premise: \"belighted\" prose, fiction made light, charged with the spirit of delight and wonder rather than weighed down by convention. As Gerdes puts it in his foreword, \"if you're looking for conventions, buy yourself a fez!\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhat the issue assembles is fiction doing what its own description names as the core purposes of the form: to warn, to enlighten, to illuminate. The work is offered as prose that can rub elbows with the great and hold its own, in the line of Joyce, Stein, Woolf, Brautigan, Calvino, Sterne, Barthelme, Burroughs, Acker, Beckett, Patchen, and Ionesco.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Eckhard Gerdes","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39350598893725,"sku":null,"price":13.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/products\/belighted-fiction.png?v=1641450641"},{"product_id":"journal-of-experimental-fiction-50","title":"Journal of Experimental Fiction 50","description":"\u003cp\u003eA milestone number in the press's print annual, edited by Eckhard Gerdes. The fiftieth issue marks a journal launched in 1986 alongside Depth Charge Press and kept running since.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA general issue, as opposed to one of the journal's Festschrift volumes for Federman, Barth, or Jaffe, is assembled from open submissions of innovative prose: no shared theme, no tribute subject, just the strongest experimental work in English the editor found for that cycle. The result is a cross-section of the form as it actually stood at print, voice by voice, intended to give idiosyncratic writers a home the commercial houses would not offer.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Eckhard Gerdes","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39350599450781,"sku":null,"price":17.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/products\/journal-of-experimental-fiction-50.png?v=1641450576"},{"product_id":"journal-of-experimental-fiction-39","title":"Journal of Experimental Fiction 39","description":"\u003cp\u003eA general number in the print annual, edited by Eckhard Gerdes. General issues carry no single theme and no tribute subject. They are open-submission gatherings of the most ambitious prose the editor found that cycle, which is why the scope tends to run panoramic, style to style and influence to influence.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe journal has appeared on a roughly bi-annual schedule since 1986, with single-author Festschrift volumes for Federman, Barth, and Jaffe interleaved among the general numbers. The numbered editions are where the press takes the measure of the form between those tributes.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Eckhard Gerdes","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39350599975069,"sku":null,"price":17.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/products\/journal-of-experimental-fiction-39.png?v=1641450550"},{"product_id":"attoho-1","title":"ATTOHO #1","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eATTOHO #1\u003c\/em\u003e is the first issue of JEF's audio anthology series, edited by Eckhard Gerdes. Where the Journal of Experimental Fiction publishes innovative prose on the page, ATTOHO carries it into sound: spoken work, sound art, and recorded pieces gathered the way a print issue gathers stories, but meant for the ear.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe first issue collects pieces by acts and writers including Ripe for Shaking, Afterthem, Michael A. Arnzen, Dead Letter Office, O'Grady featuring Mike Daily, and Denis Emorine, alongside a Raymond Federman piece with sound by Erik Belgum and an Erik Belgum and Eric Lyon collaboration. It also includes Scuff Mud, Gerdes's own spoken-word work with the band Shelf Life. Federman's presence is no accident; his suggestion that JEF devote an entire issue to his work seeded the journal's tribute model, and ATTOHO #1 extends that selection logic out of print and into recording.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Eckhard Gerdes","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39350600007837,"sku":"","price":8.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/products\/attoho-jef.png?v=1641450644"},{"product_id":"scuff-mud","title":"Scuff Mud","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eScuff Mud\u003c\/em\u003e is an audio release: a recording of Eckhard Gerdes's spoken word set against the music of the band Shelf Life, doubling as issue thirty-six of the Journal of Experimental Fiction. It is not a print anthology; it is a CD, made under the aegis of Bryan Day and the auspices of JEF.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eShelf Life on this recording is Bryan Day, Joseph Jaros, Alex Boardman, Andrew Perdue, and Jay Schleidt, improvising on homemade and prepared instruments, where strings and bodies are treated as material to be altered rather than played around. The result is spoken word that is being scored to its noise rather than competing with it: Gerdes's text and the band's improvisation do the same work, at the same rhythm, across the running time of the disc.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Eckhard Gerdes","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39350600138909,"sku":"","price":5.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/products\/scuff-mud.png?v=1641450594"},{"product_id":"john-barth-bearded-bards-and-splitting-hairs","title":"John Barth, Bearded Bards \u0026 Splitting Hairs","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eJohn Barth, Bearded Bards \u0026amp; Splitting Hairs\u003c\/em\u003e is the seventeenth issue of the Journal of Experimental Fiction, a Festschrift edited by Eckhard Gerdes and built around the work of John Barth. It is not a Barth book; it is a book about Barth, assembled the way JEF has built its single-author tributes since Raymond Federman proposed an entire issue devoted to his own work.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIts centerpiece is a previously unpublished essay by Barth, presented as a lecture at Macon State College, answered by seventeen narrative responses from students. Around it sit fiction by Steven Kedrowski, Amina Memory Cain, Daniel Borzutzky, Lee Groban, and others; parodies of famous experimental works by Thomas McCain, Dawn Hamilton, and Gerdes himself; a critical essay by Tim Miller; and a review of Barth's then-new novel \u003cem\u003eComing Soon!!!\u003c\/em\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe form is the editorial point: criticism, homage, and new creative work in one place, so that the tribute is also a contribution to the work it honors.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Eckhard Gerdes","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39350600433821,"sku":null,"price":14.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/products\/john-barth-bearded-bards-and-splitting-hairs.png?v=1624834119"},{"product_id":"a-way-with-it-contemporary-innovative-fiction","title":"A-Way with It! Contemporary Innovative Fiction","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eA-Way with It! Contemporary Innovative Fiction\u003c\/em\u003e is one of the general anthologies Eckhard Gerdes has assembled for the Journal of Experimental Fiction series, gathering work from writers at the edges of the form rather than organizing around a single honoree. The editorial premise is the title's pun: the writers collected here use language as material to be worked.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThey prod it, ply it, tweak it, fry it, sling it, smash it, caress it, destroy it, uphold it, defend it, laugh at it, play with it, split it, spit on it, freeze it, melt it, stomp on it, and hold it up for all to see as if it were the most precious thing in the entire world. Maybe it is.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Eckhard Gerdes","offers":[{"title":"Hardcover","offer_id":39782111183005,"sku":null,"price":34.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/products\/a-way-with-it-contemporary-innovative-fiction.png?v=1624830568"},{"product_id":"the-laugh-that-laughs-at-the-laugh-writing-from-and-about-the-pen-man-raymond-federman-journal-of-experimental-fiction-23","title":"The Laugh that Laughs at the Laugh: Writing from and about the Pen Man, Raymond Federman: Journal of Experimental Fiction 23","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Laugh that Laughs at the Laugh: Writing from and about the Pen Man, Raymond Federman\u003c\/em\u003e is the twenty-third issue of \u003cem\u003eThe Journal of Experimental Fiction\u003c\/em\u003e and the volume that established the press's signature form. Raymond Federman suggested an entire issue devoted to his own work, and Eckhard Gerdes built the result into the template every later JEF Festschrift would follow.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe issue gathers previously unpublished fiction by Federman, running from work he wrote as a student at Columbia to a long excerpt from a novel-in-progress, alongside criticism and homage from more than thirty-five friends, colleagues, and admirers: Jerome Klinkowitz, Charles Bernstein, Ronald Sukenick, Larry McCaffery, Doug Rice, Lance Olsen, and Mark Amerika among them. It is a working portrait of the metafictioneer assembled by the writers closest to him, and an early addition to the scholarship on his work.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe single-author tribute became JEF's editorial identity. For the press's other major Festschrift, see \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/products\/the-literary-terrorism-of-harold-jaffe\"\u003eThe Literary Terrorism of Harold Jaffe\u003c\/a\u003e, also edited by Gerdes.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Eckhard Gerdes","offers":[{"title":"Hardcover","offer_id":39592872378525,"sku":"","price":38.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/products\/journal-of-experimental-fiction-23.png?v=1624835853"},{"product_id":"the-literary-terrorism-of-harold-jaffe","title":"The Literary Terrorism of Harold Jaffe","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Literary Terrorism of Harold Jaffe\u003c\/em\u003e is the twenty-ninth issue of \u003cem\u003eThe Journal of Experimental Fiction\u003c\/em\u003e, a Festschrift built around one of American docufiction's most uncompromising practitioners. Eckhard Gerdes edited it, which makes JEF one of the few houses to issue a critical book about Jaffe rather than only reprint him.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe title's phrase is Jaffe's own register. His docufiction took news reports and court records and shifted them by a line or a frame until the source exposed its own ideology, an attempt to reclaim literature from cooption by the systems whose language it was made from. This Festschrift treats the method seriously and treats Jaffe as an acute observer of the painful conditions we live in.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThat the press already held a critical book about Jaffe is part of why his later titles found a home here. JEF went on to publish his collection \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/products\/goosestep\"\u003eGoosestep\u003c\/a\u003e and, after his death, his last book, \u003cem\u003eThe Infected Desert\u003c\/em\u003e. The Festschrift is where that long relationship started.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Eckhard Gerdes","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39350600564893,"sku":null,"price":12.89,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/products\/the-literary-terrorism-of-harold-jaffe.png?v=1624835865"},{"product_id":"journal-of-experimental-fiction-34-foremost-fiction-a-report-from-the-front-lines","title":"Journal of Experimental Fiction 34: Foremost Fiction: A Report from the Front Lines","description":"\u003cp\u003eThis is a general number in JEF's print annual, edited by Eckhard Gerdes and themed \u003cem\u003eA Report from the Front Lines\u003c\/em\u003e. The subtitle is the editorial stance. We treat experimental prose as dispatches from where the form is being tested, not as a settled genre to be sampled.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGerdes founded the journal in 1986 alongside Depth Charge Press, and the bi-annual general issues are its backbone between the single-author Festschrift volumes built around Federman, Barth, and Jaffe. Each numbered issue is a snapshot of what the press considered foremost work in English at the time of printing.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Eckhard Gerdes","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39350600597661,"sku":null,"price":14.94,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/products\/journal-of-experimental-fiction-34-foremost-fiction-a-report-from-the-front-lines.png?v=1624834136"},{"product_id":"journal-of-experimental-fiction-35","title":"Journal of Experimental Fiction 35","description":"\u003cp\u003eA general number in the press's print annual, edited by Eckhard Gerdes. The general issues carry no single theme: the editorial brief is the strongest innovative fiction in English the editor finds that cycle, from award-winning writers and emerging ones alike.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGerdes launched the journal in 1986 alongside Depth Charge Press and has kept the numbered issues coming for nearly four decades. Across that run the general numbers are where the press takes the measure of the field between its single-author Festschrift volumes built around Federman, Barth, and Jaffe.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Eckhard Gerdes","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39350600630429,"sku":null,"price":23.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/products\/journal-of-experimental-fiction-35.png?v=1624834155"},{"product_id":"the-chronicles-of-michel-du-jabot","title":"The Chronicles of Michel du Jabot","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Chronicles of Michel du Jabot\u003c\/em\u003e is Eckhard Gerdes's 733-page novel, written over roughly ten years between 2008 and 2018, much of it by hand. Begun before his wife Persis's death and finished after, Gerdes has called it \"a 733-page exhalation.\" Michel du Jabot is a Frenchman in quest of an absent father, and the book is the document of that quest told in language allowed to do what language does when no one is editing it to behave.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eYuriy Tarnawsky, in his introduction, frames the book this way: \u003cem\u003eEckhard Gerdes in his massive, whale tale kind of a book, The Chronicles of Michel du Jabot — he is not after seducing a reader or two with a suspenseful story into purchasing his book but to exercise the writer in himself, delight at his ability to use language. Gerdes is because he writes.\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAlain Arias-Misson placed the novel in the line that ends with \u003cem\u003eFinnegans Wake\u003c\/em\u003e: \u003cem\u003eWhatever you do, don't even look into Eckhard Gerdes' book, The Chronicles of Michel du Jabot, because you'll never get out of it again. It will take generations of English professors to sort it out. Hilarious semantic sport. Yes, this, not Finnegans Wake, is the novel to end the novel.\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Eckhard Gerdes","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":41731044442269,"sku":null,"price":35.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/products\/the-chronicles-of-michel-du-jabot.jpg?v=1641102679"},{"product_id":"blues-for-youse","title":"Blues for Youse","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eBlues for Youse\u003c\/em\u003e is the print companion to a recording of the same name, blues lyrics by Eckhard Gerdes tuned to cadence and the spoken line, several of them performed and recorded with Hobo Coble, Foghat, Yesayes, Thorazine Hammer, Ember Schrag, Brion Poloncic, Bryan Day, and Penelope Gerdes.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGerdes describes his method, across forms, as simply \"how I think,\" a refusal to bend prose or verse to conventional time, space, and causality. The verse sits in the same lineage as his fiction, shaped by Kenneth Patchen, Richard Brautigan, and the concrete and sound-led traditions JEF Books was founded to publish.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eRead on the page, these are lyrics waiting for their music. Heard on the recording, they are the same instinct working in another medium. The book is the place to read the words that the band was reading, with the pacing visible.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Eckhard Gerdes","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43709192831133,"sku":"","price":10.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/files\/71JZZaKhVDL.png?v=1744373575"},{"product_id":"blues-for-youse-cd","title":"Blues for Youse CD","description":"\u003cspan\u003eA collection of blues songs, the CD \"Blues for Youse\" is by Eckhard Gerdes and friends. Some of these songs, all of which are composed using lyrics written by Gerdes, are performed and recorded by Gerdes and friends Hobo Coble, Foghat, Yesayes, Thorazine Hammer, Ember Schrag, Brion Poloncic, Bryan Day, and Penelope Gerdes. \u003c\/span\u003e","brand":"Eckhard Gerdes","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43709224714397,"sku":"889290061621","price":10.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/files\/71HfT3XqOpL.png?v=1744373579"},{"product_id":"polyphony","title":"Polyphony","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003ePolyphony\u003c\/em\u003e is the ninety-eighth issue of The Journal of Experimental Fiction, the milestone that puts the press within sight of its hundredth number. Eckhard Gerdes edited it as a general anthology, gathering many voices rather than orbiting a single author.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe title names the editorial principle the press has run on since 1986. Polyphony is several independent lines sounding at once, none subordinate, which is as good a description as any of what an experimental-fiction anthology is for: idiosyncratic voices the major houses ignore, set side by side so the differences register. The issue carries that as its declared theme, and its contributors bear it out: Yuriy Tarnawsky, Lance Olsen, Harold Jaffe, Derek Pell, Brion Poloncic, Larry Fondation, and Michel Vachey (in translation), among others.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThat the journal reached issue 98 at all is the quieter fact worth noting. The numbered issues have continued, bi-annually and on purpose, for nearly four decades, in the same general-gathering mode the press has carried since \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/products\/a-way-with-it-contemporary-innovative-fiction\"\u003eA-Way with It!\u003c\/a\u003e: voices set down beside each other, not in argument, but in counterpoint.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Eckhard Gerdes","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43976701444253,"sku":"","price":15.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/files\/Cover300dpi_d32adc3a-da74-403a-8a9d-ffe59668b3d7.png?v=1744373600"},{"product_id":"isolato","title":"Isolato","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eIsolato\u003c\/em\u003e is the Italian-language edition of the novel \u003cem\u003eThe Isolate\u003c\/em\u003e, published under the byline Apollo Camembert by Giuliano Ladolfi Editore. The English original came from Black Scat Books in 2023; this is the work carried into Italian.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe title is the whole posture of the book. An \u003cem\u003eisolato\u003c\/em\u003e is one who stands apart, and the novel follows a man so worn down by modern life that he withdraws into hidden stealth housing to cut off all contact with the outside world.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe press has not annotated the Italian edition page by page, and the byline on the cover is the byline. Copies offered here come from the author's own collection.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Eckhard Gerdes","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44003928113309,"sku":"","price":15.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/files\/copertinaGerdesbozza21giugnosmall.png?v=1744373581"},{"product_id":"the-dialogue-within","title":"The Dialogue Within","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Dialogue Within\u003c\/em\u003e is a JEF general-issue anthology of experimental and innovative fiction, gathering thirty-five writers under one cover.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eJEF has been running anthologies of this kind for forty years. \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/products\/belighted-fiction\"\u003eBelighted Fiction\u003c\/a\u003e (JEF #4), \u003cem\u003eA-Way with It!\u003c\/em\u003e, the numbered issues #35, #39, #50, \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/products\/offbeat-quirky\"\u003eOffbeat\/Quirky\u003c\/a\u003e, \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/products\/polyphony\"\u003ePolyphony\u003c\/a\u003e (#98), and the single-author Festschrifts for Raymond Federman, John Barth, and Harold Jaffe are the lineage. The model came from Federman, who suggested an entire issue be devoted to his own work and inadvertently launched what became the press's signature editorial form.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe contributors read as a transit map of innovative fiction in present tense: writers based across the United States, France, Iran, Australia, and elsewhere; established voices, David Moscovich, Charles Lowe, Doug Rice, John Kinsella among them, alongside first-anthology bylines. The anthology is what the press's working list looks like in the year of its appearance.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Eckhard Gerdes","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47591493304477,"sku":null,"price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/files\/DialogueWithinCover7x10trimmed300dpi.png?v=1769209215"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/collections\/eckhard-gerdes\/anthology.oembed?page=2","provider":"The Journal of Experimental Fiction","version":"1.0","type":"link"}