A room in the house of JEF

Authors Harold Jaffe

House author

Harold Jaffe

1938 2024

JEF Books is a primary home for Harold Jaffe, who named the docufiction form: six titles from OD: Docufictions (2012) to the posthumous Infected Desert (2024).

The shelf

6 titles , published 2012 – 2024.

6 titles · 2012 – 2024 · all in print

The bio

On Harold Jaffe.

Harold Jaffe (July 8, 1938 - June 23, 2024) was an American experimental novelist, essayist, and editor whose four-decade career placed him at the center of U.S. innovative fiction. Born in New York City, educated at Grinnell College (B.A.) and New York University (Ph.D. in English and American Literature, with Distinction), he joined San Diego State University in 1982 and retired as Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature in 2019. He died in San Diego in 2024, aged 85.

Jaffe is most strongly identified with the form he named docufiction: short prose that takes news reports, court records, and other documentary source material and treats them with pointed fictional intervention to expose the ideology hidden in their original telling. From Mole's Pity (Fiction Collective, 1979) and Mourning Crazy Horse (1982) through Eros Anti-Eros (City Lights, 1990), Straight Razor (FC2, 1995), 15 Serial Killers (Raw Dog Screaming, 2003), Terror-Dot-Gov (2005), Sacred Outcast: Dispatches from India (Anti-Oedipus, 2017), and the late Brando Bleeds (2022) and Kafka Kafka (Spuyten Duyvil, 2024), he produced roughly thirty books across fiction, docufiction, essays, plays, and documentary poems.

For 42 years he was editor-in-chief of Fiction International, the thematic literary journal that relocated to SDSU with him in 1982 and became one of the longest-running U.S. venues committed to formal innovation and social activism across borders.

His JEF Books titles include OD: Docufictions (2012), Paris 60 (2012), Othello Blues (revised, 2014), Goosestep (2016), Porn-Anti-Porn (2019), and the posthumous The Infected Desert: Israel at War with the Palestinians (October 2024). JEF also published The Literary Terrorism of Harold Jaffe, the Festschrift volume gathering critical writing on his work.

He received two NEA Fellowships in fiction, two Fulbright Fellowships (to India and the Czech Republic), a New York CAPS grant, a California Arts Council fellowship, a COMBO fellowship, and three Pushcart Prizes. His work has been translated into roughly fifteen languages, among them German, Japanese, Spanish, Italian, French, Turkish, Dutch, Czech, Polish, Farsi, and Serbo-Croatian.

Start with Eros Anti-Eros (City Lights, 1990) for the early docufiction voice, then Goosestep for the JEF stretch.

From the editor

Harold gave the form a name. Docufiction. He would take a court record or a news report or a piece of state communiqué and intervene in it just enough to expose what its original framing was concealing. A transposed line. A rearranged paragraph. Nothing extra. Reading Harold for the first time, you understood that the news had been a kind of fiction all along, and that someone had finally noticed. He was uncompromising in print and patient in correspondence. He edited Fiction International for forty-two years and never made the magazine apologize for being what it was. We published Goosestep in 2016 and The Infected Desert in October 2024, four months after he died in San Diego. He sent me the final manuscript himself. Working with him was being held to a standard that does not relax. The standard does not relax now. The catalogue stands and we keep printing.

Eckhard Gerdes · founding editor, JEF

Elsewhere on record

The authority trail.

For students, for librarians, for the next biographer. We do not embed; we link out.

Only Harold Jaffe, of all people on the face of this planet, could have written this work.

— Eckhard Gerdes