{"title":"From the Backlist","description":"\u003cp\u003eSelected backlist titles at reduced prices for the press's 40th year. The discount scales with what is left on the shelf — forty percent off where stock is deepest, scaling down to ten percent on titles closer to running out. Backlist pricing applies until inventory is exhausted.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"a-little-story-about-maurice-ravel","title":"A Little Story about Maurice Ravel","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eA Little Story about Maurice Ravel\u003c\/em\u003e (Volume 65, 2015) is the only book Conger Beasley Jr. published with JEF, and it arrived the year before his death. In it the French composer Maurice Ravel is reduced to doll size and stranded on the way to a Spain he has never seen.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBeasley displays genuine affection for the historical Ravel, but immerses him in a humorous fictional milieu in the line of E. B. White's \u003cem\u003eStuart Little\u003c\/em\u003e, Mary Norton's \u003cem\u003eThe Borrowers\u003c\/em\u003e, and Walter de la Mare's \u003cem\u003eMemoirs of a Midget\u003c\/em\u003e — the tiny-protagonist tradition where the small scale of the body becomes the engine of the plot.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBeasley (1940 to 2016) was better known for award-winning literary nonfiction of the American West. \u003cem\u003eWe Are a People of This World\u003c\/em\u003e, on the Lakota Sioux and the massacre at Wounded Knee, won the 1995 Western Writers of America Spur Award for Nonfiction; \u003cem\u003eSundancers and River Demons\u003c\/em\u003e won the 1991 Thorpe Menn Award. Across four decades he published roughly nineteen books, and the prize that carries his name, the Conger Beasley Jr. Award for Nonfiction, is still awarded each year.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis is the playful end of that body of work, the fiction rather than the field notes.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Conger Beasley Jr.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39350595190941,"sku":null,"price":14.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/products\/a-little-story-about-maurice-ravel.png?v=1641450669"},{"product_id":"oppression-for-the-heaven-of-it","title":"Oppression for the Heaven of It","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eOppression for the Heaven of It\u003c\/em\u003e is a dialogue-driven novel about a son and a mother. The novel is drawn from the author's experience as the mother of a painter who lived his adult life with paranoid schizophrenia and died in 2015. Proceeds from the book are donated to the Foundation for Excellence in Mental Health Care.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe protagonist is Moonway, an orphan in conversation with the mother who is also the novel's named writer. The structure is the conversation itself: the book runs as sustained exchange, the form of two people trying to reach each other across an exile that neither has agreed to.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe 2013 Patchen judge, Harold Jaffe, named first what is rarest about the book: that it addresses schizophrenia from the subject position, not the observer's, and addresses it frankly. \u003cem\u003eOppression for the Heaven of It\u003c\/em\u003e won the 2013 \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/pages\/patchen\"\u003eKenneth Patchen Award\u003c\/a\u003e for the Innovative Novel, recognized for the rarity of that subject-position address and for the frankness with which the conversation form holds it.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Moore Bowen","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39350595289245,"sku":null,"price":15.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/products\/oppression-for-the-heaven-of-it.png?v=1641450637"},{"product_id":"dont-sing-aloha-when-i-go","title":"Don't Sing Aloha When I Go","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eDon't Sing Aloha When I Go\u003c\/em\u003e is the only book-length work Robert Casella has published, issued by JEF as \u003cem\u003eJournal of Experimental Fiction 49\u003c\/em\u003e in 2012. It arrived roughly a decade after Casella first turned up in the press's orbit as a contributor to \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/products\/the-laugh-that-laughs-at-the-laugh-writing-from-and-about-the-pen-man-raymond-federman-journal-of-experimental-fiction-23\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Laugh that Laughs at the Laugh\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e, JEF's tribute volume to Raymond Federman, who died in 2009.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eCasella had corresponded with Federman directly, contributed to the tribute, and JEF eventually published him at book length. Outside the two JEF appearances, his only located print credit is a short piece in \u003cem\u003eKeyhole\u003c\/em\u003e magazine issue 10 (2010).\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Robert Casella","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39350595322013,"sku":null,"price":13.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/products\/dont-sing-aloha-when-i-go.png?v=1641450602"},{"product_id":"tangled-in-motion","title":"Tangled in Motion","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eTangled in Motion\u003c\/em\u003e (2015) is Jane L. Carman's one JEF novel, and she calls what she made here \"fiction + truth + p(r)o(s)etry\": a hybrid of running text, prose-poetry, and lyric memoir built around love, abandonment, and the restorying of a girl who lives in the margins of an already marginalized society. Ricardo Cortez Cruz called it \"rest(less) lit at its finest,\" a phrase that points back to the Illinois State dissertation, \u003cem\u003eRest(Less) Lit\u003c\/em\u003e, out of which the book grew.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eCarman is not only a JEF author. She sits on the JEF editorial board and judged the 2019 \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/pages\/patchen\"\u003eKenneth Patchen Award\u003c\/a\u003e, selecting Genelle Chaconas's \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/products\/plague-city\"\u003ePlague City\u003c\/a\u003e. She founded Lit Fest Press, the Festival of Language reading series, and the David Foster Wallace Conference at Illinois State.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis is the book that carries her own voice rather than her editorial hand.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Jane L Carman","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39350595911837,"sku":null,"price":14.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/products\/tangled-in-motion.png?v=1641450527"},{"product_id":"how-to-break-article-noun","title":"How to Break Article Noun","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eHow to Break Article Noun\u003c\/em\u003e is a carefully crafted work consisting of seven parts, with seven chapters each, intricately interwoven to make up for the absence of a plot. The 2012 Patchen judge, Yuriy Tarnawsky, put it this way: \u003cem\u003eYou can break many things, especially the fragile ones, but also feelings and concepts. In her novel Carolyn Chun touches on the subject of breaking the former two, a bottle and a glass fish, but even though she doesn't say it openly, the book is really about the latter: breaking a person's heart and the traditional form of the novel.\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eI didn't want to have a love story until I found life to be an abiding romance with the world. I didn't want to write a love story until I found life to be an abiding romance with words,\u003c\/em\u003e Chun tells the reader in the two-sentence Introduction. The first line, \u003cem\u003eCan you close the door and sit down? Something bad,\u003c\/em\u003e recurs throughout like a sequence in a Resnais film. The novel brings together pictures, physics formulas, botanical Latin, poetry, and an embedded essay, documenting a precisely rendered case study of two people growing apart.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eHow to Break Article Noun\u003c\/em\u003e won the 2012 \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/pages\/patchen\"\u003eKenneth Patchen Award\u003c\/a\u003e for the Innovative Novel, the first novel published under JEF's revived prize. It was chosen for the exceptional craft and originality with which it is written, and for an insightful and precisely rendered depiction of a crisis in the life of two human beings.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Carolyn Chun","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39350596403357,"sku":null,"price":13.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/products\/how-to-break-article-noun.png?v=1641450553"},{"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":16.0,"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":11.0,"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":"99-waves","title":"99 Waves","description":"\u003ch2\u003eSynopsis of the Novel, 99 Waves\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWritten by the late author \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/collections\/persis-gerdes\" title=\"Persis Gerdes, Author of 99 Waves, Bio and Bibliography\"\u003ePersis Gerdes\u003c\/a\u003e, 99 Waves is a visionary novel exploring the utopian possibilities we may still have available to us as a species. Disgruntled with a capitalist world that is not working for its people, a group of friends decide a revolutionary new approach is needed, and they set out to change the way things are. Inspired by a meeting with R. Buckminster Fuller, this novel is sure to inspire readers to think beyond the confines of the traditional world.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch2\u003eAbout the Author, \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/collections\/persis-gerdes\" title=\"Persis Gerdes, Author of 99 Waves, Bio and Bibliography\"\u003ePersis Gerdes\u003c\/a\u003e\n\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/collections\/persis-gerdes\" title=\"Persis Gerdes, Author of 99 Waves, Bio and Bibliography\"\u003ePersis Gerdes\u003c\/a\u003e was the beloved wife of \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/collections\/eckhard-gerdes\" title=\"Eckhard Gerdes Editor Bio and Bibliography\"\u003eEckhard Gerdes\u003c\/a\u003e and devoted mother of Sterling, Ludwig, and Penelope Gerdes. She passed away from metastatic breast cancer in 2002, but left behind this novel, a screenplay, a couple of short stories, and a passel of people who loved her. Inspired in part by her well known grandfather, Seth Phelps, a long-time teacher at the University of Chicago Laboratory School, she earned a Master of Arts in Teaching and used her talents to help develop the love of music in underprivileged elementary school children. Her optimism and vision for a better future for the world were unwavering, and they live on through her work. All profits from the sale of this book are donated to the American Cancer Society.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Persis Gerdes","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39350596599965,"sku":null,"price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/products\/99-waves.png?v=1641450572"},{"product_id":"between-the-legs","title":"Between the Legs","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eBetween the Legs\u003c\/em\u003e is the novel that won the 2015 \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/pages\/patchen\"\u003eKenneth Patchen Award\u003c\/a\u003e for the Innovative Novel. The novel moves geographically: a couple travels from the Buchenwald concentration camp through Weimar, Prague, Vienna, and Lucerne to a Zen retreat in the Swiss Alps, carrying grief, addiction, and sexual obsession the whole way, with Freud and Kafka standing behind the prose. The award judge that year, James Chapman, chose it \"over many other worthy candidates for the exceptional craft and originality with which it is written as well as for its deep sympathy for the human condition.\"\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Kate Horsley","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39350596632733,"sku":null,"price":11.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/products\/between-the-legs.png?v=1641450583"},{"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. Hugunin","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39350596665501,"sku":null,"price":52.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/products\/afterimage-critical-essays-on-photography.png?v=1641450609"},{"product_id":"case-x","title":"Case X","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eCase X\u003c\/em\u003e puts its narrator head-first into a Tomotherapy radiation machine and keeps him there. Across thirty treatments over six weeks, an academic in a life-or-death bout with salivary-gland cancer enters what the book calls \u003cem\u003eskull-time\u003c\/em\u003e, an inner projectionist running views of his past, present, and future against the white sterility of the treatment room.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe illness is never only biological. The novel treats it as a pervasive disturbance of being in the world, an existential condition rendered through the machine's rhythm. This is Hugunin's \u003cem\u003eludicakadroman\u003c\/em\u003e at work, his term for a playful autotheory in which the memory of lived experience is one material among artworks, theory, and other texts.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHugunin came to fiction late, after decades as one of America's most prolific photography critics and a long teaching run in the History of Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The critic's eye carries into the novel: a book about being looked at, scanned, and read, written from inside the machine that does the scanning.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"James R. Hugunin","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39350597648541,"sku":null,"price":45.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/products\/case-x.png?v=1641450518"},{"product_id":"elder-physics-the-wrong-of-time-stories-from-an-elder-home","title":"Elder Physics: The Wrong of Time: Stories from an Elder Home","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eElder Physics: The Wrong of Time\u003c\/em\u003e is an illustrated novel built almost entirely from monologue. Gerald and his son trade witty, glancing talk about life inside an elder home, and as Gerald's body and mind decline he moves from Independent Living to Assisted Living and, finally, to Death.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFather and son keep pulling in other texts and refunctioning them, bending borrowed language to fit a gerontic narrative into a sampler culture. James R. Hugunin calls the mode \u003cem\u003eludicakadroman\u003c\/em\u003e: a playful autotheory in which the memory of lived experience is one material among theory, artworks, and other literary texts.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"James R. Hugunin","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39350597681309,"sku":null,"price":76.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/products\/elder-physics-the-wrong-of-time-stories-from-an-elder-home.png?v=1641450531"},{"product_id":"wreck-and-ruin-photography-temporality-and-world-disorder","title":"Wreck and Ruin: Photography, Temporality, and World (Dis)order","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eWreck and Ruin: Photography, Temporality, and World (Dis)order\u003c\/em\u003e is James R. Hugunin's book-length critical monograph on a single subject: the ruin, and what photographs of decay reveal about time itself.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhere Hugunin's other JEF criticism anthologizes decades of separate essays, this one holds to one argument across its length. Photography, he proposes, is uniquely equipped to register temporal and spatial disorder, to make visible the slow undoing the world otherwise hides. 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":58.0,"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":"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":15.0,"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":"passions-and-shadows-or-shadows-and-passions","title":"Passions and Shadows or Shadows and Passions","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003ePassions and Shadows or Shadows and Passions\u003c\/em\u003e (JEF, 2016) is the fourth novel in Frederick Mark Kramer's New York cycle, after \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/products\/apostrophe-parenthesis\"\u003eApostrophe\/Parenthesis\u003c\/a\u003e, \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/products\/ambiguity\"\u003eAmbiguity\u003c\/a\u003e, and \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/products\/meanwhile\"\u003eMeanwhile\u003c\/a\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe press describes it as Kramer's \"deepest swath yet through New York City via the interior monologue of one of its most fascinating denizens.\" That is the cycle's governing method taken further: the city rendered from inside a single consciousness, in recursive, music-derived form, in the lineage of Musil, Beckett, and the French \u003cem\u003enouveau roman\u003c\/em\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eKramer lives on the Upper West Side and is a novelist, playwright, and amateur violinist. Read it after \u003cem\u003eMeanwhile\u003c\/em\u003e and before \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/products\/peripeteia-in-slow-motion\"\u003ePeripeteia in Slow Motion\u003c\/a\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Frederick Mark Kramer","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39350598074525,"sku":null,"price":24.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/products\/passions-and-shadows-or-shadows-and-passions.png?v=1641450511"},{"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":18.0,"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":"psychedelic-everest","title":"Psychedelic Everest","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003ePsychedelic Everest\u003c\/em\u003e is Brion Poloncic's second book for JEF: a love story wrapped in a stream-of-consciousness narrative, punctuated by verbal hijinks, sweet and lyrical — a novella on the inevitability of love, on art, and on the nature of genius and madness.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePoloncic came to fiction in 2012 after a recording career as A Tomato A Day, begun in 1993, and a self-taught visual-art practice begun in 2006. JEF founder Eckhard Gerdes has called him the Daniel Johnston of the literary world. The debut is \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/products\/xanthous-mermaid-mechanics\"\u003eXanthous Mermaid Mechanics\u003c\/a\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Brion Poloncic","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39350598271133,"sku":null,"price":11.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/products\/psychedelic-everest.png?v=1641450648"},{"product_id":"the-hunter","title":"The Hunter","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Hunter\u003c\/em\u003e is built around a single porous boundary, between a young orphan's waking life and a dream world that keeps pulling at him. The novel never settles which side is the real one. Its narrator is directionless and pursued, and the question Ward holds open is which of the two worlds will finally give him the meaning he is looking for.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe book shares the preoccupations of Ward's other JEF novel, \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/products\/prism-and-graded-monotony\"\u003e\u003cem\u003ePrism and Graded Monotony\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e: death, survival, and the thin membrane between consciousness and the unconscious. 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Nile Southern, author of \u003cem\u003eThe Candy Men\u003c\/em\u003e, supplies the introduction.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe book is part of a parody line Pell has run for decades. He is the author of \u003cem\u003eAssassination Rhapsody\u003c\/em\u003e and the \u003cem\u003eDoktor Bey\u003c\/em\u003e satires, and the method here is the same: hold the form of the source straight while the content goes sideways, one canonical work at a time.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Derek Pell","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39350598369437,"sku":null,"price":11.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/products\/naked-lunch-at-tiffanys.png?v=1641450673"},{"product_id":"return-to-circa-96","title":"Return to Circa '96","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eReturn to Circa '96\u003c\/em\u003e is built like the institution it is about: its chapters are ordered by Dewey Decimal. The premise is a single year in the life of a small-town public library meeting the World Wide Web for the first time, narrated by Jeremiah D. Angelo, editor of the library's \"riverrun\" newsletter. The novel embeds two sixteen-page mock issues of that newsletter inside its own pages.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe manuscript took First Place in the Novel category of the 2005 Utah Original Writing Competition in its earlier \"Circa: 96\" form, then a decade later won the \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/pages\/patchen\"\u003eKenneth Patchen Award for the Innovative Novel\u003c\/a\u003e, which brought it to JEF.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Bob Sawatzki","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39350598467741,"sku":null,"price":31.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/products\/return-to-circa-96.png?v=1641450534"},{"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":12.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"Hardcover","offer_id":48386480079005,"sku":null,"price":12.0,"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":"like-blood-in-water-five-mininovels-the-placebo-effect-trilogy-1","title":"Like Blood in Water: Five Mininovels (The Placebo Effect Trilogy #1)","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eLike Blood in Water\u003c\/em\u003e is the first volume of Yuriy Tarnawsky's \u003cem\u003ePlacebo Effect Trilogy\u003c\/em\u003e, five mininovels that open a cycle of fifteen across three books. The themes of alienation, abandonment, and fear of death that run through \u003cem\u003eThe Future of Giraffes\u003c\/em\u003e and \u003cem\u003eView of Delft\u003c\/em\u003e are first sounded here.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe five pieces are concrete and strange. A man accidentally wanders into a session resembling Primal Scream therapy and devotes the rest of his life to screaming. A pianist stops playing because he feels his right hand isn't there. A father searches for a Bible and eats toothpaste in anticipation of his daughter's drowning at a seaside resort called Penal Port. A Luciano Pavarotti look-alike agrees to be killed in a reenactment of the murder of Agamemnon. A man dresses up in a mountain climber's outfit as he goes in for a surgery he has been trying to avoid at all cost. The mininovels work by negative text: gaps of vital information the reader has to supply, bringing personal experience into the story and becoming, with the author, its co-author.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eLike Blood in Water\u003c\/em\u003e was first published by FC2 in 2007 and reissued by JEF in 2013 as part of \u003cem\u003eThe Placebo Effect Trilogy\u003c\/em\u003e, paired with \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/products\/the-future-of-giraffes-five-mininovels-the-placebo-effect-trilogy-2\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Future of Giraffes\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e and \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/products\/view-of-delft-five-mininovels-the-placebo-effect-trilogy-3\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eView of Delft\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Yuriy Tarnawsky","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39350598533277,"sku":null,"price":15.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/products\/like-blood-in-water-five-mininovels-the-placebo-effect-trilogy-1.png?v=1641450620"},{"product_id":"the-future-of-giraffes-five-mininovels-the-placebo-effect-trilogy-2","title":"The Future of Giraffes: Five Mininovels (The Placebo Effect Trilogy #2)","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Future of Giraffes\u003c\/em\u003e is the middle book of Tarnawsky's \u003cem\u003ePlacebo Effect Trilogy\u003c\/em\u003e, five mininovels at the center of a fifteen-mininovel cycle, and the only one of the three given over entirely to childhood. The form was Tarnawsky's own invention: short prose built on what he called \"negative text,\" gaps of vital information the reader is obliged to supply, so that finishing the book means becoming its co-author.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThat demand is most explicit here, and childhood is its proving ground. A boy naps during a family picnic and wakes alone in the world. A cognitively impaired savant boy decides he has had enough and trudges off toward his grave. A boy is forced to leave his hometown of Blood City after his mother's funeral. Another is imprisoned in a quarry for a barbarous experiment of survival. A last one dreams of turning into a rat to hide in a wall once his parents are gone. The dread that runs through the trilogy, alienation, abandonment, the fear of death, is here drawn at a child's scale.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt follows \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/products\/like-blood-in-water-five-mininovels-the-placebo-effect-trilogy-1\"\u003eLike Blood in Water\u003c\/a\u003e and precedes \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/products\/view-of-delft-five-mininovels-the-placebo-effect-trilogy-3\"\u003eView of Delft\u003c\/a\u003e; of the three, it is the one in which Tarnawsky lets the omissions sit closest to the body of the reader.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Yuriy Tarnawsky","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39350598598813,"sku":null,"price":15.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/products\/the-future-of-giraffes-five-mininovels-the-placebo-effect-trilogy-2.png?v=1641450598"},{"product_id":"view-of-delft-five-mininovels-the-placebo-effect-trilogy-3","title":"View of Delft: Five Mininovels (The Placebo Effect Trilogy #3)","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe third book of Tarnawsky's \u003cem\u003ePlacebo Effect Trilogy\u003c\/em\u003e, the five mininovels that close out a cycle of fifteen. The form was his own: compressed prose that reaches the scale of a novel through what he called \"negative text,\" gaps of vital information the reader supplies from personal experience, finishing the book as the author's co-author.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe closing five turn the trilogy's dread outward into stranger lives. A neurotic intellectual is adopted by a couple with a son with Down syndrome, hoping to escape the stress of being normal. A man searching for meaning goes mad in the end. The son of a suicidal Prussian Junker family becomes obsessed with an albino boy. Love between two people is shown to be as transient as a cloud. The trilogy's preoccupations, alienation, abandonment, the fear of death, are here brought to their resting point.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe five close out a trilogy that follows \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/products\/like-blood-in-water-five-mininovels-the-placebo-effect-trilogy-1\"\u003eLike Blood in Water\u003c\/a\u003e and \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/products\/the-future-of-giraffes-five-mininovels-the-placebo-effect-trilogy-2\"\u003eThe Future of Giraffes\u003c\/a\u003e. Read in order, the three are one structure in fifteen parts, the most sustained demonstration of the omission method Tarnawsky built across his late career.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Yuriy Tarnawsky","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39350598631581,"sku":null,"price":15.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/products\/view-of-delft-five-mininovels-the-placebo-effect-trilogy-3.png?v=1641450653"},{"product_id":"xanthous-mermaid-mechanics","title":"Xanthous Mermaid Mechanics","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eXanthous Mermaid Mechanics\u003c\/em\u003e is Brion Poloncic's first book — his first work in any literary form after a recording career as A Tomato A Day, begun in 1993, and a self-taught visual-art practice begun in 2006. 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Jonathan Lyons cut his draft into blocks and columns, pinned the fragments across the walls of his basement, and reassembled the exploded narrative into a unified whole. The subtitle is the method: a shattered novel, put back together so the seams stay visible.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhat the pieces reassemble into is the story of two brothers whose summer is detonated by trauma. The cut-up does not scatter the book; it concentrates it, letting the reader feel the breakage as form rather than read about it as plot. The seams the method leaves on the page are the point: a novel that proves its subject by carrying its own fracture in the architecture.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Jonathan Lyons","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39350598926493,"sku":null,"price":15.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/products\/minnows-a-shattered-novel.png?v=1641450579"},{"product_id":"you-are-make-very-important-bathtime","title":"You Are Make Very Important Bathtime","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eYou Are Make Very Important Bathtime\u003c\/em\u003e is David Moscovich's flash-fiction novel and an anthropology of self-exoticism: a celebration of cultural misunderstanding set in Southern Japan, where an expatriate narrator becomes as foreign to himself as the host culture becomes to him.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe book runs by micro-sentence units that accumulate into a macro form, the short performed pieces aggregating until the second-person \"you\" the title names is pushed toward release. 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The narrative method is the one the whole cycle runs on: dense interior monologue, recursive musical structure, the European high-modernist tradition (Musil, Beckett, the French \u003cem\u003enouveau roman\u003c\/em\u003e) carried forward in a present-tense New York voice.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAcross five novels and counting, the cycle builds the same instrument and turns it on the same city: a single consciousness held inside one continuous sentence-line, the city's noise and history pulled in through the consciousness rather than narrated around it. \u003cem\u003eMeanwhile\u003c\/em\u003e is the book where Mario carries the instrument, and the conversation between immigrant interior and Manhattan exterior is what the prose is.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Frederick Mark Kramer","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39350599254173,"sku":null,"price":13.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/products\/meanwhile-journel-experimental-fiction.png?v=1641450684"},{"product_id":"od-docufictions","title":"OD: Docufictions","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eOD: Docufictions\u003c\/em\u003e is a collection of thirteen short fictions built around a single fact: thirteen famous personages who either died of an overdose or were so invested in drugs that the drugs helped kill them. 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Haske located Jaffe's docufictional style closer in spirit to free verse than to standard fiction.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Harold Jaffe","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39350599319709,"sku":null,"price":13.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/products\/od-docufictions.png?v=1641450557"},{"product_id":"othello-blues","title":"Othello Blues","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eOthello Blues\u003c\/em\u003e is the one novel on JEF's Harold Jaffe shelf with two lives: first published by FictionNet in 1996, then revised and reissued by JEF Books in 2014. The reissue is the version the press stands behind, the book as Jaffe wanted it left.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eUnlike the docufiction collections he is best known for, this is sustained narrative. Jaffe sets Shakespeare's tragedy in a near-future New York City and the Mississippi delta and recasts the principals as a band: Othello, called Otis, on guitar; Cassio on bass; Iago on harmonica and jew's harp; Desdemona as the white wife of Otis. The novel is dedicated to bluesman Robert Johnson and runs on dialect, stage directions, quick cuts, and lean syncopated prose, turning blank verse percussive. Thomas LeClair called it an imaginative, witty, and politically prescient retelling.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Harold Jaffe","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39350599385245,"sku":null,"price":14.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/products\/othello-blues.png?v=1641450680"},{"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. 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Recurring images shift register without explanation, sex sits next to death in adjacent sentences, and the narrative refuses to settle into a single line.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWard's other JEF novel, \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/products\/the-hunter\"\u003eThe Hunter\u003c\/a\u003e, is built on a similar set of preoccupations from a steadier narrative footing; readers new to Ward sometimes find that one the easier first step, and return to this slimmer, earlier piece for the version of the same questions held in their least resolved form.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Dominic Ward","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39350599483549,"sku":null,"price":13.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/products\/prism-and-graded-monotony.png?v=1641450546"},{"product_id":"ambiguity","title":"Ambiguity","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eAmbiguity\u003c\/em\u003e is the second novel in Frederick Mark Kramer's New York cycle, following \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/products\/apostrophe-parenthesis\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eApostrophe\/Parenthesis\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e by a year.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe book is built around its narrator, Darko, and the metaphor of \u003cem\u003ethe pneuma\u003c\/em\u003e — what Darko calls \"the breath of life or the destruction of life,\" with the novel taking place in between. 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