AMERICAN RADICAL

“As with Joyce Carol Oates’s Blonde, Harold Jaffe’s Brando Bleeds is the best kind of biographical fiction — perceptive, inventive, richly thematic, and truer than true. That his concisely rendered composite of Brando gives us such a full portrait of its subject is nothing short of a miracle.”  —Tom Whalen


As BLACK SCAT approaches its 10th anniversary (July 4th), we’re excited to announce the publication of a major new novel by Harold Jaffe—one of America’s most innovative writers and thinkers.

BRANDO BLEEDS is a “docufictional” version of the life of renegade cultural icon Marlon Brando. Harold Jaffe seamlessly weds biographical fact and fiction, breathing new life into Brando as shaman/showman, an anti-Hollywood “movie star” whose radical politics forced him to confront the inevitable contradiction between rebel/activist and capitalist avatar. Drawn from biographical sources and Brando’s films, the author unveils Brando as a unique artist who both witnesses and introjects the world in pain.

BRANDO BLEEDS
A Novel by Harold Jaffe
Paperback; 181 pp., $14.95
ISBN 979-8985999655


CRITICAL PRAISE FOR HAROLD JAFFE

Each of Jaffe’s volumes has been groundbreaking. He has written some of the most innovative fiction of our time.   —Toby Olson

EROS ANTI-EROS is… a wonder of deadpan humor, biting wit and visual beauty. No recent fiction has gripped me with such force and immediacy.   —Marianne Hauser

From the docufictional shards of GOOSESTEP emerges a savage prophetic voice as grief-maddened as Isis picking through the bones on illusion’s killing floor to reassemble a dream that cannot be reanimated.   —Patricia Eakins

As TERROR-DOT-GOV vividly demonstrates: We are spiritually imperiled by illusions masked as “news.” Omissions, slants, pallid editorials all testifying to servitude to a slavish, enslaving “text.” Harold Jaffe knows this by heart.  Everywhere in Terror-dot-Gov, is exemplary skill, faultless tonality, and courage. Don’t forget courage.    Daniel Berrigan, SJ

The bravura essays in Harold Jaffe’s collection, REVOLUTIONARY BRAIN, challenge the conscience and consciousness of their readers. This witty and explosive book is an indictment of injustice and spurious morality and a call to art and enlightened activism as healing alternatives. —Jonathan Baumbach

Harold Jaffe’s SACRIFICE is an omnidirectional cry of alarm and call to action…[his] adept prose is a heart-filled and intellectualized reaction to terrestrial issues, a combination of rage, revulsion, and an implied plea for amelioration—in the fullest form of self-sacrifice.   Sebastian Bennett

“Jaffe’s convincing portraits of the dispossessed are moving, insightful glimpses of the human spirit under stress.” —New York Times Book Review

As always, Jaffe’s writing is moving, comical, marvelously deft.” —Washington Post



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.