Endless Short Story

by Ronald Sukenick

I, Bitchakokoff, Kewpie Slitz, Dong Wang, Crown Prince von Moccasin and Aziff defy common sense in a series of topographical adventures that skate across the page as if there were no yesterday. These interconnected stories project a sense of life as ongoing improvisation in which you never know what's going to happen next, in which you are always in the middle of the story and in which events do not begin and end but only start and stop. Making use of the urban folklore of childhood, the resources of typography and the eccentricities of experience, they have the continuity of a doodle, a comic strip or a painting by Paul Klee. Written in a style that pits the reality of the page against the fictionality of life, these stories address the strangeness, comedy, and unpredictability of common experience, moving from hyper-realism to a child-like playfulness and covering a wide range of moods and levels of organization. The Endless Short Story continues Ronald Sukenick's dialogue with "the intelligence," in which he has said, "you practice a discipline of abstraction I practice a discipline of inclusion. You practice a discipline of reduction I of addition. You pursue essentials I ride with the random. You cultivate separation toward stillness I rest in movement."

Genres: Short Stories

132 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

Ronald Sukenick was an American writer and literary theorist.

Sukenick studied at Cornell University, and wrote his doctoral thesis on Wallace Stevens, at Brandeis University.

After Roland Barthes announced the "death of the author", Sukenick carried the metaphor even further in "the death of the novel". He drew up a list of what is missing: reality doesn't exist, nor time or personality. He was widely recognized as a controversial writer who, frequently humorously, questioned and rejected the conventions of traditional fiction-writing. In novels, short stories, literary criticism and history, he often used himself, family members or friends as characters, sometimes quoting them in tape-recorded conversations. He did stints as writer in residence at Cornell University, the University of California, Irvine, and Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel. But his books were never best-sellers. Sukenick once commented that he had “only forty fans, but they’re all fanatics.”

He referred to his career as a university professor as his "day job". He taught at Brandeis University, Hofstra University, City College of the City University of New York, Sarah Lawrence College, Cornell University, the State University of New York (Buffalo), and l'Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier, France. His most prolonged teaching career was at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he was professor of English from 1975-1999.

He was actively committed to publishing and promoting the writing of other unconventional writers. He was founder and publisher of American Book Review, and a founder of The Fiction Collective (now Fiction Collective Two). Sukenick was chairman of the Coordinating Council of Little magazines, and on the executive council of the Modern Language Association and the National Book Critics Circle.

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 3 out of 5]

I hadn’t heard of New York publisher the Fiction Collective before chancing upon this book. They seem like an interesting avant-garde press with a bagful of unpublishable arrogance up their sleeves. Brilliant. This book contains a series of formally innovative stories that use typography and punctuation-free mayhem to make their mark. In some cases the form determines the content, as in ‘Boxes’ (stories in little text boxes) or ‘Verticals and Horizantals.’ In other cases, the experiments are either tedious, as in ‘Bush Fever’ or intolerable, an in the S-o-C ‘5 & 10.’ My favourite is the Sorrentino-ish ‘Duck Tape’ where the narrator's identity is played around with and ‘What’s Watts’ is a blast of Beckettian fun. This sort of postmodernism kicked the bucket in the eighties, so it’s nice to look back and see it wasn't as terrible as some dissenters say. This title is currently out of print.

[Marc Nash · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars video review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKo0g...

[Anthony · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was hoping to get some kind of brilliantly constructed circular narrative here, but this is actually just a collection of experimental short stories that intermittently play on the idea of an "endless short story". And while that phrase is really more interesting in and of itself than it is in any of the contexts that Sukenick creates for it, there are a few super cool ideas floating around in this book. I loved the opening story where Simon Rodia buries his car in his backyard, and the car becomes a seed from which the Watts towers begin to grow. I also like the idea of the wordbomb (you roll phrases up into balls and "then you throw them at somebody and they explode into meaning") and I loved Sukenick's aspiration to write the Great American Postcard. But most of the book is just, you know...

[Donald Armfield · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is off-beat writing, I enjoy this style of writing but this was just blah. I'm also a fan of Sueknick's work reading "Up" and "Death of the Novel"

The best part of this scribbled mess is the section labeled "Duck Tape" which is great dialogue with brain storming on how to write this novel, if thats what you call it.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

I keep reading this Sukenick guy. I don't entirely know why. Can't say I know entirely what he's about. He seems to keep blowing stuff up with his word=bombs. The kind of thing Franz most feared finding on his doorstep ; yet another wordbomb from FC2. No plot ;; no characters. This must be a good thing. But you probably wouldn't like it.

[Aaron Dietz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sukenick forces a sort of exaggerated perception, pointing out what is important. Or distracting you just to be an ass, I’m not really sure.

[🐴 🍖]

for me this falls a little short of death of the novel on account of a couple indigestible cut-up/prose-poem-y sections, but still hella worthwhile if you're into the whole "serious-interrogation-of-narratological-concerns-only-it-feels-like-a-comic-strip" type thing that is by and large sukenick's bag... if you need that extra little impetus to wiretap your next duck dinner look no further