Elements of a Coffee Service

by Robert Glück

Gluck achieves the difficult art of integrating unabashed (gay) erotic writing into an intelligent non-pornographic narrative."-Ian Young

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Poetry, Queer, Gay

106 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1982

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

[Vampire Who Baked · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book I will probably go back to many times over-- and every time I shall read it differently. The pieces can be a little dense, and need to be read fairly slowly-- this is something you absorb, via osmosis through your fingers, you contemplate, underline passages and turn them over in your head again and again like examining a new toy or a pretty little pebble, or as Hrabal put it, you sip each beautiful sentence like a liqueur, or you pop into your mouth and suck it slowly like a fruit drop until the solid content dissolves into juice in your skin and courses through your veins into every part of your existence.

Probably the most dazzlingly brilliant book I have read in a very, very long time. What started out as a series of experimental short fiction pieces soon evolved into an exploration and deconstruction of literary elements like genre, template, etc.-- in particular, I have never seen such effective use of "queering" as a literary technique.

Very, very highly recommended.

[Mason · Rating 5 out of 5]

A compact collection of stories brimming with intelligence and sensuality. Gluck’s image-laden language lends a brilliant sheen to the sex, camp and emotional turbulence of his subject matter.

[Joe · Rating 4 out of 5]

beautiful, poetic book

[Emily E · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, unique, erotic writing that digs sharply.

Personally, I enjoyed Glück’s novel Margery Kempe more than I enjoyed this collection of stories.