Federman A to X-X-X-X: A Recyclopedic Narrative

by Raymond Federman

Brace for some Next-generation post modernity! Federman A to A Recyclopedic Narrative is a remarkable, wide-ranging casebook/album of materials related to the life and work of Raymond Federman. A French Jew and Holocaust survivor, one of the world's leading Beckett scholars, and the author of over twenty books of fiction, poetry, and criticism, Federman has also been one of postmoderism's most radical literary innovators and most influential theoreticians.Federman A to X-X-X-X is the first major critical study devoted to his work to appear in America. Assembled by editors Larry McCaffery, Thomas Hartl, and Doug Rice, the volume unfolds as a series of several hundred alphabetically arranged entries in double columns forming an elaborate mock-encyclopedia of the sort Borges or Nabokov might have imagined. These entries include over a hundred representative stories, novel excerpts, essays, poems, and letters by Federman, many of which are previously unpublished, and hundreds of other entries by authors, critics, editors, and correspondents analyzing, criticizing, or often collaborating with Federman's works.Also included are individual entries on authors, artists, and books that influenced Federman, samples from a wide range of fiction, poetry, and criticism that illuminate his writing, a comprehensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources, as well as a generous selection of photographs, drawings, reproductions of paintings, documents, manuscript pages, and other visual materials. Among entries are a number of unpublished essays and commentaries about Federman's work commissioned specifically for this volume by well-known critics and translators including Brian McHale, Richard Martin, Ronald Sukenick, Geoffrey Green, and many others.

Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Raymond Federman was a French–American novelist and academic, known also for poetry, essays, translations, and criticism. He held positions at the University at Buffalo from 1973 to 1999, when he was appointed Distinguished Emeritus Professor. Federman was a writer in the experimental style, one that sought to deconstruct traditional prose. This type of writing is quite prevalent in his book Double or Nothing, in which the linear narrative of the story has been broken down and restructured so as to be nearly incoherent. Words are also often arranged on pages to resemble images or to suggest repetitious themes.

Reviews

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

RECYCLING this Review because I just REREAD it and I kind of licked it.


_______
I’m pretty certain (quite sure) that you’ve not yet heard enough about Raymond Federman. You’ve probably been told an insufficient number of times about how his mother shoved him into a closet as those nazi dogs climbed the stairs to drag off his X-X-X-X to be turned into lampshades. And if you don’t believe the story, Raymond Federman possesses the records of the deportation and auschwitzification of X-X-X-X. So just do the rest of us a damn favor and before you float another one of your damn’d hitler reviews please read Federman and find out what Laughterature really is. Nor am I at all convinced that the centuries long project of colonialism is just like the baking of people in ovens and on the other side of that token I’m not at all certain that the best means to react to that unforgivable enormity is to sacralize it as a unique evental moment of history. Ray is still writing his poems.

At any rate, however you come down on those issues, what we have here is a real treat! A four hundred page Recylopedia recycling everything you already know and everything you’ve always wanted to know about Raymond Federman (alas, missing are the final ten years of Ray’s work and life) but were either afraid to ask or didn’t know enough yet to ask. Excerpts, essays, rare B-sides and outtakes, You Name It! It’s all in there! Almost as if our Three Stooge=Editors had lost their editing shears -- they just shoved it all right in!

What we have here in this Recyclopedia is the most severe case of the Federman Virus I have ever encountered. That’s not surprising given that Ray is BURIED in this country (the Germans love to laugh with him!). But I’ve seen some evidence that the Federman Virus is gaining a toehold on goodreads. And I’m not sure anyone has anti-virals prepared. Viruses aren’t fun and people die from them. Like from AIDS or Ebola. So maybe we shouldn’t joke like this. Or maybe we should learn to laugh and learn how to write Laughterature. You don’t own me, we might insist, The Federman Virus owns me!

Get Federmanniacal!!

[Geoff]

A Blurb:

"Brace for some Next-generation post modernity! Federman A to X-X-X-X: A Recyclopedic Narrative is a remarkable, wide-ranging casebook/album of materials related to the life and work of Raymond Federman. A French Jew and Holocaust survivor, one of the world's leading Beckett scholars, and the author of over twenty books of fiction, poetry, and criticism, Federman has also been one of postmoderism's most radical literary innovators and most influential theoreticians.

Federman A to X-X-X-X is the first major critical study devoted to his work to appear in America. Assembled by editors Larry McCaffery, Thomas Hartl, and Doug Rice, the volume unfolds as a series of several hundred alphabetically arranged entries in double columns forming an elaborate mock-encyclopedia of the sort Borges or Nabokov might have imagined. These entries include over a hundred representative stories, novel excerpts, essays, poems, and letters by Federman, many of which are previously unpublished, and hundreds of other entries by authors, critics, editors, and correspondents analyzing, criticizing, or often collaborating with Federman's works.

Also included are individual entries on authors, artists, and books that influenced Federman, samples from a wide range of fiction, poetry, and criticism that illuminate his writing, a comprehensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources, as well as a generous selection of photographs, drawings, reproductions of paintings, documents, manuscript pages, and other visual materials. Among entries are a number of unpublished essays and commentaries about Federman's work commissioned specifically for this volume by well-known critics and translators including Brian McHale, Richard Martin, Ronald Sukenick, Geoffrey Green, and many others."