Jim Meirose

Jim Meirose is a Somerville, New Jersey writer of psychologically intense experimental fiction. He was originally influenced by Faulkner, Woolf, and Joyce, then worked through Beckett, Burroughs, Pynchon, Wallace, and Arno Schmidt, arriving at the demanding, sound-driven prose that defines his current work. He has said a writer is meant to explore "untapped and unknown levels of human reality," and over a thirty-year career he has produced more than a dozen novels for some fourteen different small presses.

His short fiction has appeared in literary magazines including Collier's, Alaska Quarterly Review, New Orleans Review, South Carolina Review, Witness, American Literary Review, and 14 Hills. Individual stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Shirley Jackson Award, and one was a runner-up for the O. Henry Awards.

JEF published his novel Understanding Franklin Thompson as Journal of Experimental Fiction vol. 73 (2019), in the Offbeat/Quirky Editions line. Franklin Thompson and Mother Audrey live simply in a quiet small town, but a mental disorder they share repeatedly forces them to the depths of despair. Its prime symptom is that they are driven apart into separate realities, in which each believes they will never see the other again. Panic-stricken, they each fight and claw themselves back to sanity by repeating the same behavior that has saved them in the past.

His other novels include Sunday Dinner with Father Dwyer (Optional Books), Le Overgivers au Club de la Résurrection (Mannequin Haus), Audio Bookies (LJMcD Communications, 2024), Et Tu (C22 Press, 2023), Game 5 (Soros Books, 2024), and the Montag Press titles Mount Everest and Eli the Rat (2016), and Dans l'odeur de la sainteté (Optional Books). Reviewers have invoked Beckett, Flannery O'Connor, and Joyce; the editor George Salis called Le Overgivers "a superbly accomplished novel."

Start with Understanding Franklin Thompson, the JEF novel and his most direct entry point into the work.