Denny Smith

by Robert Glück

The stories in DENNY SMITH use events in the life of Robert Gluck as a ground for the expansion of empathy and intellect. These events include burglary, sex, conversation, reading, humiliation, child raising, and porn. Gluck's previous books include MARGERY KEMPE and JACK THE MODERNIST, both newly available from SPD. "Flaubert says in a letter to Louise Colet that good prose should be stuffed with things. This is good prose indeed, filled with shells and duck meat and sunlight and flesh and gardening tools and sperm..."--Samuel R. Delany.

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories, Literature

267 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Born in Cleveland, poet, fiction writer, editor, and New Narrative theorist Robert Glück grew up there and in Los Angeles. He was educated at the University of California, Los Angeles, the University of Edinburgh, the College of Art in Edinburgh, and the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned a BA. He also studied writing in New York City workshops with poet Ted Berrigan and earned an MA at San Francisco State University.

With Bruce Boone and other writers, Glück co-founded the New Narrative movement in San Francisco in the early 1980s. Glück’s experimental work—typically prose—infuses L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E theory with queer, feminist, and class-based discourse while exploring issues of autobiography and self. In his essay “Long Note on New Narrative,” which appeared in Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative (2004), Glück stated, “We were thinking about autobiography; by autobiography we meant daydreams, nightdreams, the act of writing, the relationship to the reader, the meeting of flesh and culture, the self as collaboration, the self as disintegration, the gaps, inconsistencies and distortions, the enjambments of power, family, history and language.”

Glück’s poetry includes the collection Reader (1989) and, with Bruce Boone, the collaboration La Fontaine (1981). His fiction includes the story collection Denny Smith (2003) and the novels Jack the Modernist (1995) and Margery Kempe (1994). Glück’s work has been selected for numerous anthologies, including The Faber Book of Gay Short Fiction (1992), Best American Erotica 2005, and Lust for Life: On the Writings of Kathy Acker (2006). He has received a California Arts Council Fellowship and a San Francisco Arts Commission Cultural Equity Grant.

Glück has served as director of San Francisco State’s Poetry Center, codirector of the Small Press Traffic Literary Center, and editor for Lapis Press and the literary journal Narrativity. He lives in San Francisco.

Reviews

[Fabian · Rating 3 out of 5]

The terrain between prose and poetry is pretty harsh: a work must be balanced in both accounts in order for it to be... something. Here, the prose is too intelligent & the poetry is too. It cannot be that the brain and the heart are the same thing... well, only in certain circumstances. This NOT being one of them.

That being said, there is an enviable easiness with words here, an obvious love of language. There's no story here, only snippets. Some sentences are so clever that they probably took weeks to be composed!

[Terry · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this book up mainly because of its size and the simplicity of the front cover artwork. I find that it's perfect to tuck away in a overcoat pocket when I travel by public transit and am not carrying a manbag. I last read some of his stories a couple weeks ago and found myself blushing on the train. The first two shorts were almost toeing the line of pornography. Not that there's anything wrong with that. ;-) To be continued...

[Nicholas · Rating 4 out of 5]

different ways to think/write about the relationship between fiction and autobiography.....and queer kinship.

[Emmanuel · Rating 4 out of 5]

the sex

[Monster Okay · Rating 5 out of 5]

I heard once that Robert Gluck is often described as a writers writers writer. That is a writer who only writers that only writers read read. This is, to me, more then just a quippy summation of his popularity (though, how popular can a contemporary queer prose poet be,?) but it's also a great way towards unlocking what's so intriguing about Gluck.

Because what's great about Robert Gluck is in the way he handles prose, his subtle word play, and the strange narratives he concocts that straddle the line between dream, anecdote, and poem, the way he sustains this for much longer then seems possible, and the way he writes about immediate experiences without ever getting bogged down in the moment. This is to say absolutely nothing of how brave he is by writing so intimitly about himself, stripping himself down to his bare essentials (the first story in this collection ends with him in the bathroom at dinner with his dad, lifting up a seashell full of cum, another story finds him wanting to be in an incestuous relationship with two boys on a television show, another finds him jealous of his niece for throwing away a relationship with two boys who seem to be right out of his youth)

This collection is great, and if you can find it, definitely be sure to pick it up.

[Ocean Chamberlain · Rating 5 out of 5]

Accidentally gifted to me by someone who certainly did not know how difficult it is to get a copy of this these days, this book lived in my coat’s inner pocket for one entire winter, and I’d read it on trains and in pubs after work. These stories engendered my entire experience of living for that winter. I was both lucky and grateful to see life through Robert Glück’s eyes. I remember reading out loud the entirety of “On the Boardwalk” over voice memos to a far away friend who refused to read the clumsy scan I’d sent. All culminated in a meeting with Robert Glück himself at a December book launch event for About Ed. We were all crowded in the tiny bookstore, sitting on the ground and pressed against the window front, smiling up at him with tears in our eyes while he read. Glück knows things that we do not know, about language, about sex, about grief, and these stories are entirely sincere. Five stars.

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was difficult to penetrate the strangely cold and obtuse poetic language and I'm not sure if it was worth the effort. Only one story lit up: "Miss American Pie" which would be well worth anthologizing.

[Rochelle Torke · Rating 4 out of 5]

We can never hope to understand everything in Mr. Gluck's head but we can relish him anyway. He is a fantastic, quirky, darkish, hilarious, experimental Bay Area writer.