After Yesterday's Crash: The Avant-Pop Anthology

by Larry McCaffery (Editor)

Some of the hottest writers of the 90's shared a subversive aesthetic sensibility, avant-pop, that drew on the forms, images, slogans, characters, and narrative archetypes of our multidimensional, information-dense culture cartoons, films, music videos, advertising, and rock music to explore and critically examine that culture.
Each of these thirty-two works delves into the deeper metaphorical implications of this pop cultural imagery to convey a turn toward overstimulation and hyper-consumption in American life, and to explore issues of personality and identity. This provocative, stylistically experimental work is truly literature for the twenty-first century."

Contents:
• Introduction: Avant-Pop: Still Life After Yesterday's Crash • essay by Larry McCaffery
• Current Events • short story by Steve Katz
• The Exorcist • short story by Rikki Ducornet
• Incarnations of the Murderer • short story by William T. Vollmann
• Moonlight Whoopie Cushion Sonata • short story by Tom Robbins
• From Border Brujo • short story by Guillermo Gómez-Peña
• From Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America • short story by Craig Baldwin
• Oh, Brother • short story by Mark Leyner
• From Arc d'X • short story by Steve Erickson
• The Rapture of the Athlete Assumed Into Heaven • short story by Don DeLillo
• Light • short story by Stephen Wright
• Weird Romance • short story by Derek Pell
• X ≠ Y? • short story by Susan Daitch
• A Lucky Pierre World Premiere • short story by Robert Coover
• Victims of Mass Imagination • short story by Lauren Fairbanks
• Skinner's Room • short story by William Gibson
• Counter Couture • short story by Harold Jaffe
• EHMH: A Millennial Romance • short story by Eurudice
• Great Breakthroughs in Darkness (Being, Early Entries from 'The Secret Encyclopaedia of Photography') • short story by Marc Laidlaw
• Straight Hincty • short story by Ricardo Cortez Cruz
• Hostile Takeover • short story by Craig Padawer
• Notes Scribbled in the Dark While Watching Schindler's List, or What Price Schindler's Pots & Pans? • short story by Raymond Federman
• Hand Writing on Wall • short story by Ronald Sukenick
• Stone Columbus: Talk Radio from the Santa Maria Casino • short story by Gerald Vizenor
• Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko • short story by David Foster Wallace
• False Water Society • short story by Ben Marcus
• Granmmatron • short story by Mark Amerika
• Bad News • short story by Lynne Tillman
• Ella's Special Camera: From Waxweb • short story by David Blair
• Bonanza • short story by Curtis White
• Blackouts • short story by Paul Auster
• Heavy Weather • short story by Bruce Sterling
• End of the 1980s • short story by Bret Easton Ellis

Genres: Short Stories, Anthologies, Fiction

384 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

Reviews

[Samantha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unfortunely I lost this book years ago. And by lost it I mean I loaned it to an unreliable ex who absconded with it when he headed home to Seattle. But I digress. This book is a wonderful collection of weird, wonderful, silly and slightly horrific short fiction. Not all the stories are excellent, a few are awful, but overall this is a collection that showcases a certain type of literature that rarely gets the attention it deserves.

[Aaron Ambrose · Rating 1 out of 5]

Triple filtered for maximum annoyance, this is a hyper-dated collection of nonsense from a misguided aesthetic from fin de grunge 1995. Most of the stories are as coherent and engaging as a Mad Lib. Out of 32 stories, two didn't actively repel me, so it wasn't hopeless. But that's a 6.25% NON-REPELLENT rate. Ye gods.

[Heather · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good overview of experimental writing.

[Sheila Bitts · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't read all of the stories, but many for my class. I liked the Erickson story the best.

[Carlo Mayer]

Finiti

[Giovanni Botta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finito nel 01/gen/1970 00:00:00