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OD: Docufictions
Each of Harold Jaffe's 13 docufictions features a well-known personage who either died of an overdose or was invested in "drugs" to the extent that they contributed to his/her death. Marilyn Monroe, Billie Holiday, Bela Lugosi, Aldous Huxley, Freud, Poe, Lead Belly, Sonny Liston, Diane Arbus, jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, and Abbie Hoffman are among those featured. High culture and pop. Dead and ghostly. The narrative dance that Jaffe performs with these apparitions is unexpected, intricate, melancholy, comical, brilliant in every register.
- GenresFiction
132 pages, Paperback
First published December 7, 2011
7 people want to read
About the author
Harold Jaffe
88 books29 followersHarold Jaffe is the author of 22 books, including nine fiction collections, one nonfiction collection, and three novels.
Jaffe's fiction has appeared in such journals as The Mississippi Review, City Lights Review, The Paris Review, New Directions in Prose and Poetry, Chicago Review, Chelsea, Fiction, Central Park, Witness, Black Ice, Minnesota Review, Boundary 2, ACM, Black Warrior Review, Cream City Review, Two Girls' Review, and New Novel Review. His stories have been anthologized in Pushcart Prize, Best American Stories, Best of American Humor, Storming the Reality Studio, American Made, Avant Pop: Fiction for a Daydreaming Nation, After Yesterday's Crash: The Avant-Pop Anthology, Bateria and Am Lit (Germany), Borderlands (Mexico), Praz (Italy), Positive (Japan), and elsewhere.
His novels and stories have been translated into German, Japanese, Spanish, French, Dutch, Czech, and Serbo-Croatian.
Harold Jaffe has won two NEA grants in fiction, a New York CAPS grant, a California Arts Council fellowship in fiction, and a San Diego fellowship (COMBO) in fiction.
Jaffe teaches literature at San Diego State University and is editor of Fiction International.
Jaffe's fiction has appeared in such journals as The Mississippi Review, City Lights Review, The Paris Review, New Directions in Prose and Poetry, Chicago Review, Chelsea, Fiction, Central Park, Witness, Black Ice, Minnesota Review, Boundary 2, ACM, Black Warrior Review, Cream City Review, Two Girls' Review, and New Novel Review. His stories have been anthologized in Pushcart Prize, Best American Stories, Best of American Humor, Storming the Reality Studio, American Made, Avant Pop: Fiction for a Daydreaming Nation, After Yesterday's Crash: The Avant-Pop Anthology, Bateria and Am Lit (Germany), Borderlands (Mexico), Praz (Italy), Positive (Japan), and elsewhere.
His novels and stories have been translated into German, Japanese, Spanish, French, Dutch, Czech, and Serbo-Croatian.
Harold Jaffe has won two NEA grants in fiction, a New York CAPS grant, a California Arts Council fellowship in fiction, and a San Diego fellowship (COMBO) in fiction.
Jaffe teaches literature at San Diego State University and is editor of Fiction International.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
March 28, 2012
The subjects of Harold Jaffe’s latest book can relate. Jaffe, a literature professor at San Diego State University and editor of Fiction International, explores the ultimate in bad luck: those who, in seeking the pinnacle of pleasure, experience a fatal overdose.
In OD, published by the Journal of Experimental Fiction in Illinois, the untimely deaths of Bela Lugosi, Billie Holiday, Jim Jones and many others are worked over and reimagined. Jim Morrison as Artonin Artaud. Sonny Liston as Mafia meat grinder. Marilyn Monroe as Circe: “Her skin-tight red dress above the knees, her steep décolletage, no underwear, her dreamy, wiggling walk away from the mounted zoom, away from the panting worldwide audience….”
OD is a book of “docufictions”: Jaffe’s term for prose that uses the historical record as a leaping-off point for fictive digressions. The entries typically open with all the panache of a Wikipedia entry but then diverge in wild and imaginative ways that aren’t always immediately apparent.
Deaths are faked. Celebrities assassinated by the CIA. Conspiracies proliferate like bacteria in a petri dish. One can learn a great deal along the way, but because fact intermingles with fiction, Jaffe’s docufictions create their own truths.
In OD, published by the Journal of Experimental Fiction in Illinois, the untimely deaths of Bela Lugosi, Billie Holiday, Jim Jones and many others are worked over and reimagined. Jim Morrison as Artonin Artaud. Sonny Liston as Mafia meat grinder. Marilyn Monroe as Circe: “Her skin-tight red dress above the knees, her steep décolletage, no underwear, her dreamy, wiggling walk away from the mounted zoom, away from the panting worldwide audience….”
OD is a book of “docufictions”: Jaffe’s term for prose that uses the historical record as a leaping-off point for fictive digressions. The entries typically open with all the panache of a Wikipedia entry but then diverge in wild and imaginative ways that aren’t always immediately apparent.
Deaths are faked. Celebrities assassinated by the CIA. Conspiracies proliferate like bacteria in a petri dish. One can learn a great deal along the way, but because fact intermingles with fiction, Jaffe’s docufictions create their own truths.
March 14, 2012
I'm a longtime fan of Harold Jaffe's work. His last book, Paris 60, was among my favorites. Happily, OD is another strong effort. From start to finish, I read the book with pleasure.
The book chronicles the lives (or pieces thereof) of public figures and celebrities whose deaths were due, at least in part, to drug overdoses. Included are chapters on Marilyn Monroe, Abbie Hoffman, Jean Seberg, Jim Jones, Billie Holliday, Jim Morrison, and many others.
"OD" offers significant insight into their lives, while Jaffe's customary docufiction style grants the author license to alter the facts in ways that suit him, often in the form of invented narrators or characters that play off more established biographies, and bring a broader social context to the accounts of these notable figures and the circumstances of their demise.
Whether the reader is familiar with the subjects or not, the stories here will illuminate and resonate, as Jaffe's prose, style and insights are consistently engaging and thought provoking, and as powerful as a junkie's speedball.
The book chronicles the lives (or pieces thereof) of public figures and celebrities whose deaths were due, at least in part, to drug overdoses. Included are chapters on Marilyn Monroe, Abbie Hoffman, Jean Seberg, Jim Jones, Billie Holliday, Jim Morrison, and many others.
"OD" offers significant insight into their lives, while Jaffe's customary docufiction style grants the author license to alter the facts in ways that suit him, often in the form of invented narrators or characters that play off more established biographies, and bring a broader social context to the accounts of these notable figures and the circumstances of their demise.
Whether the reader is familiar with the subjects or not, the stories here will illuminate and resonate, as Jaffe's prose, style and insights are consistently engaging and thought provoking, and as powerful as a junkie's speedball.
May 16, 2022
Three and a half, for the inventiveness and remaking of the lives of Marilyn, Janis, Jimi, and more, who died of overdoses. For those who like crisp narratives that have a foot in two worlds: the sensational/speculative, and what can be verified.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews