The Big Lie

by Mark Wallace

Fiction. A boy finds an artist's manifesto on the floor, a gay man reflects on his regrets, a woman suddenly sees a man's face through her car window. Subtly referencing some of the great iconoclasts of literature and philosophy (Kafka, Wilde, Nietzsche), the vignettes in THE BIG LIE unveil a defiant sense of contemporary artistic possibility, rising at times into a full-scale attack on American style consumerism, unmediated authorship, and the bloated privileges of literary genius. Quick shifts between styles, personas, and subject matter keep the reader critical and wary.

56 pages, Paperback

First published September 18, 2000

About the author

Mark Wallace was born in 1962 in Princeton, New Jersey and grew up in the Washington, D.C. area. Between the ages of 8 and 17, with his father and brother he drove across the United States to Southern California on camping trips every summer, once going by way of Mexico City and once by way of Lake Banff, and he has spent time in all 48 of US mainland states.

The numerous bad jobs he has worked since the age of 15 are distinguished not by working class physical labor but by the low paid tedium of the contemporary world’s bureaucratic nightmare.

He received his Ph.D. from the State University at Buffalo with his dissertation The Gothic Universe in the Fiction of Paul Bowles and William Burroughs. He worked at Buffalo as a student assistant to Charles Bernstein on "The Wednesdays At Four Plus" reading series.