The flagship issue fêtes Christine Brooke-Rose, one of the most innovative voices of the twentieth century, whose fiction plays challenging games with form and structure, using grammatical constraints, multiple languages, and a dicing of genre styles and theoretical discourses as an integral component of her novels. Brooke-Rose is among an unfortunate revue of writers whose work is fading out of print, rarely part of critical or academic discussion. This 320-page issue contains creative and critical responses to her fiction, theory, and criticism, written with an eye to the general literary reader unfamiliar with her output, but with enough homage, parody, imitation, and analysis to excite her devoted fan base.
A festschrift, as defined by Merriam-Webster online, is "a volume of writings by different authors presented as a tribute or memorial especially to a scholar." The writer feted in the Verbivoracious flagship festschrift was a scholar who also happened to be one of the most innovative writers of the 20th century (and certainly for the first decade of the 21st century). This collection contains essays, homages, and stories inspired by the work of Christine Brooke-Rose, arranged in the publication order of her books, commencing with the poem Gold (reprinted for the first time here), and concluding with Life, End of. The writers featured are an eclectic mix1 of critics, storytellers, ardent readers, academics, pasticheurs, homageurs, and people coerced to read the works of Christine Brooke-Rose for the sole purpose of contributing to this festschrift. Those not yet acquainted with her work should find sufficient entry points to her varying, often complex, sometimes cryptic, always playful, methods. Unswerving converts to her constraints will find many rapturous moments in the numerous flawlessly executed fictions included."
A monument to our insatiable verbivoracity, The Syllabus is an act of humble genuflection before the authors responsible for those texts which have transported us to the peak of readerly nirvana and back. The texts featured, chosen in a rapturous frenzy by editors and contributors alike, represent a broad sweep of the most important exploratory fiction written in the last hundred years (and beyond). Featuring 100 texts from (fewer than) 100 contributors, The Syllabus is a form of religious creed, and should be read primarily as a holy manual from which the reader draws inspiration and hope, helping to shape their intellectual and moral life with greater awareness, and lead them towards those works that offer deep spiritual succour while surviving on a merciless and unkind planet. Readers of this festschrift should expect nothing less than an incontrovertible conversion from reader to insatiable verbivore in 225 pages. "The Syllabus, as a third volume of Verbivoracious Festschrift, is a celebration of reading. It's a great literary feast for the true readers, for all the verbivores around the world, a feast consisting of hundred delicious meals. I am honored to be a part of that unforgettable menu." - Dubravka Ugre i ."
A brilliant and overlooked amalgam of highbrow genius and contemporary pop culture, Gilbert Adair is a pasticheur par excellence and the subject of the Verbivoracious Festschrift Volume Two. Contains a savoury range of pastiches, essays, and Adair's previously unpublished verse poem parody, The Rape of the Cock.
Rikki Ducornet is a magical surrealist, postmodern fabulist, multi-talented artist and poet, and author of several novels ripe with epicurean vocabulary, vivid and outrageous imagery, fantastically arcane trivia and erudition, and Rabelaisian re-imaginings of history, among them the Carteresque hellfire of The Stain, the Lewis Carroll homage and wonder-of-wonders The Jade Cabinet, and the beautiful, slowly unfurling heart-attack, Netsuke. Across her career, spanning four decades, Ducornet has pursued her inexhaustible obsession with Eros, the violence of the Marquis de Sade and other monsters, and the enchantment of the wunderkammern. The fourth VP festschrift, including critical essays, personal memoirs, fiction homages, and two in-depth interviews, explores Ducornet's passions and obsessions, with particular attention to her novels, illuminating the unforgettable work of a "linguistically explosive" author whose "vocabulary sweats with a kind of lyrical heat" (NY Times). CONTRIBUTORS: Forrest Aguirre, Ricco Barbels, Mary Caponegro, Robert Coover, Rikki Ducornet, Tammy Dasti, Michael J. Emmons, Brian Evenson, Allan Guttmann, Randall Heath, Lily Hoang, Joanna Howard, Laird Hunt, Carolyn Kuebler, Nadine Mainold, Steven Moore, Warren Motte, Tod Rise, Michelle Ryan-Sautour, Eleni Sikelianos, Raymond L. Williams, and Igo Wodan. "For those who know her, Rikki Ducornet's very name signifies enchantment and her works induce a state of rapture." -- Michael Silverblatt, KCRW Bookworm "The Complete Butcher's Tales is one of my all-time favorite books, but I love Rikki Ducornet's entire body of work. This festschrift, this wonderful book, is above all a place to think about Rikki -- to shine a bright, grateful light on her Vision. The contributors have done a miraculous job celebrating the work of an unspeakably beautiful, significant artist, thinker, and friend." --Kate Bernheimer, author of Horse, Flower, Bird
The sixth Verbivoracious Festschrift is a brobdingnagian spectacular fEting the famous workshop of potential literature, The Oulipo, now entering its 57th year. Our contributors were invited to write a piece of fiction, an essay, a poem, or any other hybrid, and choose their own constraints. The results have yielded a marvellous sprawl of oulipian homage, from petite poetic tributes to Queneau, to long lipogrammatic bows to Perec. In this issue: Philip Terry's take on Perec's I Remember, Warren Motte's literary abecedaries, David Bellos's iconoclastic essay on Hugo and Perec, two chapters from Jeff Bursey's lipogrammic novel Ennead, Louis Bury's anticipatory blurbs, Michael Leong's take on the Oulipo's ever-expanding influence, Tom Jenks and Jeanelle D'Alessandro's satirical N]7s, Andriana Minou's typographically playful novella Hypnotic Labyrinth, John Peck's murder mystery in 100 sentences, poetry from Doug Nufer and Stephen Frug, Marc Lapprand's view on evolution and The Oulipo, a slew of palindromes, lists, papers, and fancies from Pablo Ruiz, and many other pieces. The issue concludes with a wholly original work of sustained constraint: Christine Brooke-Rose's first novel rewritten with her grammatical constraints and polylingual puns reinstated. The sixth issue is our fattest feast yet, and a must for Oulipo enthusiasts.
The fifth issue fEtes tireless innovator in fiction and poetry, renowned Beckett scholar, relentless self-mythologiser, impish postmodern theorist, riotous humorist, playful pedagogue, friend and father Raymond Federman, with contributions from Jerome Klinkowitz, Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Jacob Paul, Douglas Messerli, Larry McCaffery, Julia Frey, Geoffrey Gatza, Ted Pelton, Simone Federman, Steve Katz, Serpil Opperman, G.N. Forester, Eckhart Gerdes, Doug Rice, plus exclusive fictions from the Federman archives, including several from an abandoned volume of abandoned fictions. "Only a century as excruciating as the twentieth could have produced a voice like Raymond Federman's - a voice in a closet, hailing us all with scurrilous laughter and absurd wisdom. This volume in celebration of Hombre de la Pluma samples that voice, and echoes with the voices of some of those who resonated to it. It's all a pack of lies and, of course, all perfectly true." -- Brian McHale, author of Postmodernist Fiction "A feast for Fed-heads and a great introduction for newcomers, this lavish volume is an appropriately irreverent, loving, and off-the-wall celebration of one of the most important writers of post-war American fiction. Yeah, really. Time to reappraise, critics. And for the rest of you guys, time to dive back in. Federman lives " -- Scott Black, author of Of Essays and Reading in Early Modern Britain
With these audacious and murderously witty stories, Donald Barthelme threw the preoccupations of our time into the literary equivalent of a Cuisinart and served up a gorgeous salad of American culture, high and low. Here are the urban upheavals reimagined as frontier myth; travelogues through countries that might have been created by Kafka; cryptic dialogues that bore down to the bedrock of our longings, dreams, and angsts. Like all of Barthelme's work, the sixty stories collected in this volume are triumphs of language and perception, at once unsettling and irresistible. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
[In this novel by the 2012 Nobel Laureate in Literature], "a benign old monk listens to a prospective novice's tale of depravity, violence and carnivorous excess while a nice little family drama--in which nearly everyone dies--unfurls ... As his dual narratives merge and feather into one another, each informing and illuminating the other, Mo Yan probes the character and lifestyle of modern China."--Publisher's description.
