Month: October 2021

THE PLAY’S THE THING

Harold Jaffe‘s new collection, Strange Fruit & Other Plays, challenges the reader to confront an America awash in racism, hatred, and violence. With cunning precision, Jaffe employs 20th century icons of art, cinema, music, & literature, to illuminate the dark place we find ourselves in today.

Here are nine diverse and innovative one-act plays, featuring Billie Holiday & Lester Young;  Antonin Artaud & Georges Bataille; Marilyn Monroe & Marlon Brando; Samuel Beckett; condemned prisoners in Texas making their final statement before execution; Israelis & Palestinians in life-or-death dialogue; Charles Manson unleashed; Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin & Jim Morrison burning it at both ends; & the potently satirical “Splish Splash,” exploring gender discord.

Harold Jaffe is the author of 30 novels, short fiction collections, essays, and plays. His recent books include Porn-anti-Porn and BRUT: Writings on Art & Artists. He is editor-in-chief of Fiction International.

 

 

 

Escapist Fiction

So begins this mesmerizing tale by a gifted young writer: Su Orwell. Her unique style, laced with edgy humor, makes ESCAPE ARTISTS a memorable work of contemporary  erotic fiction. It is the story of a married woman, Susann, who encounters the charismatic Arjan online. What begins as an internet flirtation soon evolves into an unusual affair — a fantasy escape becomes a reality of intense pleasure, taking Susann far from her suburban comfort zone.

Escape Artists
Su Orwell
Pocket Erotica #19
paper; 66 pp., $10
ISBN: 13 978-1-7379430-0-6

photo by Rob Gaczol

             

Su Orwell’s debut novel, Edge of Sundown, was published by Darkstroke Books in 2020. Her short prose and essays have appeared in Write City Magazine, Writing Disorder, Raconteur, and The New Urge Reader 4, among others. She lives in Chicago.

 

 

 

 

Boy Meets Girl

We don’t have a clue what it is to be male or female, or if there are intermediate genders. Male and female might be fields which overlap into androgyny or different kinds of sexual desires. But because we live in a Western, patriarchal world, we have very little chance of exploring these gender possibilities. —Kathy Acker

After (mis)reading Don Quixote, a boy transforms himself into “Janey Smith,” a character he glimpsed in Kathy Acker’s  Blood and Guts in High School. The unnamed Catholic narrator  wanders the streets of Pittsburgh, slipping in and out of gender roles,  seducing men and women — erasing his sense of his own flesh. Sex and gender are joined in Janey—a dream—who becomes an atheist of desire, on a quest to become an imperceptible shadow.

Doug Rice (author of Here Lies Memory) channels Kathy Acker in this elegiac prose poem which will haunt the reader like a strange, erotic dream.

JANEY QUIXOTE
Doug Rice
Pocket Erotica No. 18
New Urge Editions
67 pp., $10; paper
ISBN: 978-1-7373711-8-2

Doug Rice is the author of When Love Was, Here Lies Memory, An Erotics of Seeing, Das Heilige Buch der Stille, Faraway, So Close, Between Appear and Disappear, Dream Memoirs of a Fabulist, Blood of Mugwump, and other books of fiction, photographs, and memoir. His work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Zyzzyva, Gargoyle, Discourse, and Fiction International. He was a Literary Fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, Germany, 2012-2014. He is the publisher of Nobodaddies Press, which will be reappearing in 2022. 

Also Available

A TREAT FOR HALLOWEEN

There is a veritable army of zombie books out there but nothing remotely like this one. This obscure novel — THE ZOMBIE OF GREAT PERU — is a masterpiece of avant-garde weirdness — written by one Pierre-Corneille Blessebois, “the Casanova of the 17th century,” as an act of literary revenge. It is not simply vengeful, but it’s the first work in world literature to use the word “zombie” and stands as an early example of bizarre black humor. This outrageous relic—unearthed & translated from the French by the incomparable Doug Skinner—is the novel’s first appearance in English and features a preface by the great Guillaume Apollinaire.