Frederick MarkKramer

Frederick Mark Kramer is a novelist, playwright, and amateur violinist based on Manhattan's Upper West Side. His fiction is a sustained, multi-decade investigation of New York City's inner life, rendered through dense interior monologue, recursive musical structure, and explicit conversation with the European high-modernist tradition (Musil, Beckett, the French nouveau roman).

Kramer's New York project runs across two presses. Under Sagging Meniscus Press, whose editor describes the reading experience as "akin to sitting in a train and hearing someone in the seat behind you explaining how they came to be who they are," he published Café Purgatorio (2023), an aging poet's reckoning with a dead friend and lost lover over Manhattan drinks, and the 606-page They Shall Not Pass: A Novel of Madrid and Manhattan (2025), which braids the Spanish Civil War with present-day downtown New York through four interior voices across three generations. Earlier work appeared under the UK micro-press e-booksonline around 2003 (Thickets of Qualia, Dialogue with Myself), and a 2007 Depth Charge Publishing edition of Apostrophe/Parenthesis predates its JEF reissue.

JEF Books is his primary English-language home. Across 2011 to 2025 the press has published five of his novels, making him the most prolific JEF novelist of the post-2010 era: Apostrophe/Parenthesis (2011), which opens the cycle with Federigo, an imagined grandson of Musil's Man Without Qualities; Ambiguity (2012); Meanwhile (2014), which follows the Jewish immigrant Mario reconciling with his past; Passions and Shadows or Shadows and Passions (2016), the press's "deepest swath yet through New York City"; and Peripeteia in Slow Motion (2025), a single-morning reverie on art, life, and sexual fantasy. He is not a Kenneth Patchen Award winner; he is a foundational JEF house novelist rather than a prize-track entrant.

Start with Apostrophe/Parenthesis, the novel that opens the cycle and establishes its method.