The Literary Terrorism of Harold Jaffe


Book Description

Harold Jaffe's acts of literary terrorism work to wrestle control of the future of literature away from the dominant culture. This book celebrates that effort. Jaffe is an acute observer of the painful conditions under which we are forced to live on a daily basis. And like any harbinger of ill, he is sometimes mistaken for its creator. But he is not. He is clearing out space that has been polluted for too long. His acts of literary terrorism are acts that reclaim literature and art fiction from its cooption by fast-food-wielding advocates of disposability: what has been disposed by the dominant political culture has too often been literary artists. Those who have benefited have seldom been literary artists. Jaffe has worked brilliantly to save literature from its unwitting complicity in the elimination of readers who dare question authority. The writing in this volume, whether by Jaffe, his former students and colleagues, or works inspired by his lead, helps blast us out of our complacency and reclaim space we should never have relinquished. Innovation and renovation are inextricably linked.




Turning the Page


Book Description

American Book Review is not just a book review—it is also the heart and soul of writerly writing and small press publishing. In 2006, the publication was relocated to Victoria, Texas, where cultural critic and philosopher Jeffrey R. Di Leo became editor and publisher. Turning the Page collects Di Leo’s contributions to American Book Review from his more recent “Page 2” entries on “social reading” and book bannings in Arizona to his early engagements with the work of Raymond Federman and Harold Jaffe. The common themes are book and publishing culture, and how they intersect with current problems in the humanities, including the rise of neoliberalism. “There is no dimension of contemporary book culture that Jeffrey Di Leo doesn’t examine beautifully in Turning the Page. These essays are essential reading for everyone who cares about the state of literature today.”—Charles Johnson, author, Middle Passage “For the past decade, Jeffrey Di Leo, the editor of American Book Review, has been a witty, genial, super-well-informed, and incisive guide to what’s been happening on the literary scene as well as the public world beyond it.”—Marjorie Perloff, Sadie Dernham Patek Professor of Humanities Emerita, Stanford University “Literary culture is going through convulsions not seen since the emergence of the printing press, which is exactly why Jeffrey Di Leo’s Turning the Page is such necessary reading.”—Steve Tomasula, author, TOC: A New-Media Novel




Revolutionary Brain


Book Description

In this timely collection of essays and "quasi-essays," acclaimed novelist and critic Harold Jaffe explores the intricate vicissitudes of millennial culture. Gesturing, in a philosophical shorthand, toward a kind of pop Armageddon, Revolutionary Brain is at once thesis, allegory, and surreal comedy, demonstrating just how far we, and the natural world we have debased, have fallen. Obsessed with technology, we are incapable of reconstructing ourselves. By way of Jaffe's elegant prose and perfect pitch, our collective disability is laid bare at the 11th hour. REVOLUTIONARY BRAIN is a powerful cry for a brave new aesthetics that turns towards, not away, from our tormented globe.







Terror-dot-gov


Book Description

As in Harold Jaffe's two previous "docufiction" collections, False Positive and 15 Serial Killers, the author of Terror-Dot-Gov selects then "treats" his texts such that the reader is incapable of distinguishing between fact and fiction. That ambiguity permits Jaffe to cunningly tease out the contradictions and subtexts of official "news" or "information" and torque it into what it so often is fundamentally: jingoism, xenophobia and propaganda. Jaffe's subject in Terror-Dot-Gov is not the everywhere-represented "illicit" terrorism so much as "licit," institutionalized terrorism, and he assaults his subject from multiple angles: razor-sharp satire, precisely cadenced rhetoric, faux-reportage, and "unsituated" dialogues (Jaffe's term, referring to his trademark talking heads with perfect pitch). The result is virtuosic and paradoxical: a prodigious display of firepower-in the cause of peace.




Straight Razor


Book Description

Time: 20 minutes into the future Setting: The treacherous margins of post-industrial society Cast: Sexual outlaws, serial murderers, techno-freaks, gender benders, rogue cops, punk anarchists Content: Horror, outrage, razor-sharp satire, virtuosic writing and visual beauty by two of the most original contemporary American artists, in collaboration In this uncanny collection of 12 stories, Harold Jaffe-author of Eros Anti-Eros, Beasts, and Madonna & Other Spectacles and Norman Conquest, artist illustrator extraordinaire, have produced a book with the precision of a laser and the charge of a land mine.




Anti-twitter


Book Description

These 50-word stories are based on "found" texts from mainstream news sources and other public sites. Jaffe sculpts them to reveal their inner core, all niceties stripped away. Now the true motives, fears and sins of our age are on display for all who care to see. Amidst an internet-driven content boom, meaning has virtually disappeared. ANTI-TWITTER's extreme brevity demonstrates by example that brief need not = dumbed-down. Though the stories describe a wide arc: high and pop culture, intimate and public, sordid and exalted, all subjects are equally laid bare by Jaffe's incisive stratagems.




15 Serial Killers


Book Description

Exploring dangerous territory, Jafee uses illustrations, letters, monologues, interviews, and "unsituated dialogues" to bring to life some of the most infamous serial killers of all time.




Beyond the Techno-cave


Book Description

Cultural Writing. Essays. For some 25 years, Harold Jaffe's name has been synonymous with confrontational innovative fiction with a subversive edge. BEYOND THE TECHNO-CAVE collects the author's recent "creative nonfiction," including insights on art, writing, technology, global politics, travel, and intersections of all of these. Many of Jaffe's texts read like formally innovative narratives, others function like conceptual art, remaining in the mind long after. Everywhere evident is Jaffe's broad erudition, social commitment, and energized, elegant writing. "One of our finest literary terrorists/freedom fighters"--Paradoxa. Collection includes Jaffe's moral call on writers to return from their "inner emigrations" and re-includethemselves in our world and politics, "The Writer During Wartime."