{"title":"Harold Jaffe","description":"\u003cp\u003eHarold 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eJaffe 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 \u003cem\u003eMole's Pity\u003c\/em\u003e (Fiction Collective, 1979) and \u003cem\u003eMourning Crazy Horse\u003c\/em\u003e (1982) through \u003cem\u003eEros Anti-Eros\u003c\/em\u003e (City Lights, 1990), \u003cem\u003eStraight Razor\u003c\/em\u003e (FC2, 1995), \u003cem\u003e15 Serial Killers\u003c\/em\u003e (Raw Dog Screaming, 2003), \u003cem\u003eTerror-Dot-Gov\u003c\/em\u003e (2005), \u003cem\u003eSacred Outcast: Dispatches from India\u003c\/em\u003e (Anti-Oedipus, 2017), and the late \u003cem\u003eBrando Bleeds\u003c\/em\u003e (2022) and \u003cem\u003eKafka Kafka\u003c\/em\u003e (Spuyten Duyvil, 2024), he produced roughly thirty books across fiction, docufiction, essays, plays, and documentary poems.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFor 42 years he was editor-in-chief of \u003cem\u003eFiction International\u003c\/em\u003e, 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHis JEF Books titles include \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/products\/od-docufictions\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eOD: Docufictions\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e (2012), \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/products\/paris-60\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eParis 60\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e (2012), \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/products\/othello-blues\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eOthello Blues\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e (revised, 2014), \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/products\/goosestep\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eGoosestep\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e (2016), \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/products\/porn-anti-porn\"\u003e\u003cem\u003ePorn-Anti-Porn\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e (2019), and the posthumous \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/products\/the-infected-desert-israel-at-war-with-the-palestinians\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Infected Desert: Israel at War with the Palestinians\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e (October 2024). JEF also published \u003cem\u003eThe Literary Terrorism of Harold Jaffe\u003c\/em\u003e, the Festschrift volume gathering critical writing on his work.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHe 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eStart with \u003cem\u003eEros Anti-Eros\u003c\/em\u003e (City Lights, 1990) for the early docufiction voice, then \u003cem\u003eGoosestep\u003c\/em\u003e for the JEF stretch.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"goosestep","title":"Goosestep","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eGoosestep: Fictions \u0026amp; Docufictions\u003c\/em\u003e is one of the late-career docufiction collections from Harold Jaffe. Docufiction, the short-prose form Jaffe wrote roughly thirty books in across four decades, takes news reports, court records, and other documentary source material and treats them with minimal, pointed intervention.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eJaffe (1938 to 2024) edited \u003cem\u003eFiction International\u003c\/em\u003e for forty-two years and was Professor Emeritus of Fiction at San Diego State. The press believed enough in the work to commission \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/products\/the-literary-terrorism-of-harold-jaffe\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Literary Terrorism of Harold Jaffe\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e, a critical Festschrift edited by Eckhard Gerdes, while Jaffe was still alive.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Harold Jaffe","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39350598008989,"sku":null,"price":15.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/products\/goosestep-jef.png?v=1641450666"},{"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. The roster runs Marilyn Monroe, Billie Holiday, Bela Lugosi, Aldous Huxley, Freud, Poe, Lead Belly, Sonny Liston, Diane Arbus, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, and Abbie Hoffman. The title is the abbreviation a coroner writes; the book is what Harold Jaffe does with what comes after.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDocufiction is the form the book runs on: news reports, court records, and other documentary source material treated with minimal but pointed intervention, a transposed line, a rearranged paragraph, a recontextualization that lets the original telling expose its own ideology and pathology. Reviewing this book, Joseph D. 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":15.0,"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":16.0,"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":"paris-60","title":"Paris 60","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eParis 60\u003c\/em\u003e is sixty short entries, some fictionalized and some factual, recorded across a Paris spring and written against the template of Baudelaire's \u003cem\u003eParis Spleen\u003c\/em\u003e. The number is the structure: sixty prose pieces, a modern poet's city set beside the nineteenth-century one that named the prose poem. Jaffe wrote them on a two-month sabbatical in 2008, working the city as a self-styled flaneur and self-acknowledged outsider.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe book sits squarely in the docufiction project Harold Jaffe spent four decades developing: short prose that intersects journal, essay, narrative, and verse, taking documentary source material and treating it with minimal but pointed intervention that lets the original telling expose its own ideology. Citing Gramsci, Jaffe embraces the activist writer who, like the Baudelaire of \u003cem\u003eParis Spleen\u003c\/em\u003e, seeks to turn melancholy into a principle of conquest. The book has been translated for readers in Romania, Turkey, France, Japan, Italy, and Cuba.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt is the late-period Jaffe taking his method on the road and pressing it against the city that invented the form he had been working in all along.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Harold Jaffe","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39350599614621,"sku":null,"price":15.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/products\/paris-60.png?v=1641450676"},{"product_id":"porn-anti-porn","title":"Porn-Anti-Porn","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003ePorn-Anti-Porn\u003c\/em\u003e is one hundred and ten docufictions that hold the body in pain and the body in pleasure inside the same frame, the texts brief, erotic, anti-erotic, fiercely funny, fired at the reader from opposing directions. The title states the contradiction the book refuses to resolve. Pornography and its repudiation are kept in one room, and Jaffe declines to choose between them.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDocufiction was the form Harold Jaffe spent four decades developing: short prose that takes news reports, court records, and other documentary source material and treats it with minimal but pointed intervention, a recontextualization that lets the original telling expose its own ideology and pathology. At one hundred and ten pieces this is one of his largest applications of the method, sex as the site where capital and morality are most openly at war.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe argument is in the hyphen of the title. Jaffe writes from both sides of it at once and declines the resolution the culture keeps demanding.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Harold Jaffe","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39350601449629,"sku":null,"price":15.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/products\/porn-anti-porn.png?v=1624835478"},{"product_id":"the-infected-desert-israel-at-war-with-the-palestinians","title":"The Infected Desert: Israel at War with the Palestinians","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Infected Desert: Israel at War with the Palestinians\u003c\/em\u003e is Harold Jaffe's last book, published four months after his death. The form is documentary poems, a turn Jaffe took in his final years toward verse that carries the same documentary charge as his prose.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe subject is the Israeli war on the Palestinians, and Jaffe addresses it two ways at once: through brief, tensely discerning free verse and through actual documents that he reconstitutes so the buried subtexts come to the surface. It is the method he spent four decades developing on prose, documentary source material rearranged just enough to expose what its ideology had kept hidden. The press frames the book against the suppression of truth-telling that runs through US discourse about the war, and credits Jaffe with the courage to do what he believed documentary poems must do, which is tell truth to power.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt is the closing line of one of American innovative fiction's most uncompromising documentary projects, and the form he ended on was the form the subject demanded. JEF also publishes \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/products\/goosestep\"\u003eGoosestep\u003c\/a\u003e, \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/products\/paris-60\"\u003eParis 60\u003c\/a\u003e, and \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/products\/od-docufictions\"\u003eOD: Docufictions\u003c\/a\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Harold Jaffe","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45629838786717,"sku":"","price":12.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/files\/INFECTEDDESERTCOVER.png?v=1744373608"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/collections\/harold-jaffe\/short-fiction.oembed","provider":"The Journal of Experimental Fiction","version":"1.0","type":"link"}