The Gymnasium: Exercises in Literary Taxidermy

by Mark Malamud

A Hellenistic god who can't escape his past.
A rock band whose music is so bad it paralyzes from the waist down.
A black-market vegetable genetically-modified for self-abuse.

These are just a few of the stories of melancholy and wonder inside THE GYMNASIUM, an exercise in "literary taxidermy" by the author of FLOAT THE POOCH. By "re-stuffing" what goes in-between the opening and closing lines of classic works by Milan Kundera, Philip K. Dick, Thomas Wolfe, Ian Fleming, and others, Mark Malamud has assembled nineteen new and wholly-original fictions. "THE GYMNASIUM demonstrates re-sampling isn't just for music." - re/ART "At turns funny, sad, serious, and surreal - none of these stories will let you down." - Robert Kramer "A roller-coaster of styles and voices, all anchored to the simple but powerful idea of re-imagining someone else's words as your own." - Storybook

298 pages, Paperback

Published January 11, 2018

About the author

Mark Malamud is a tail-end baby-boomer, writer, poet, puzzle-maker, designer, futurist, former software developer, and master dogsbody. He is the co-founder and consulting inventor at Raxacoricofallapatorius, and principal and manager of busymonster, LLC, a consultancy company focused on advanced user interface and design. During his ten-year tenure at Microsoft, Mark became the company’s first user interface architect. His interests include advanced technologies, intellectual property, anti-intellectual property, synthetic observation, and cheese. Mark studied at Brown University where he received his bachelor’s degree in psychology. He holds over 700 patents, and in 2012 he was the 8th most-prolific inventor of patents in the US.

Reviews

[Patricia Bowen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book of short stories and a novella sparked the beginning of 'Literary Taxidermy'. It's a method of using the first and last sentences of a well known novel and writing a brand new story between what I'll call those 'bookends'. I picked up the book because there's a Literary Taxidermy contest for short story writers and I wanted to see how it all began.

Some of Malamud's stories were quite good, a few I couldn't make sense of, some were so-so. The thing that put me off was the lack of a consistent author's voice, or style, or something to appeal to a certain type of reader. They were so all over the place, not a collection of sci-fi, or of romance, or of mysteries. It's a fun concept, and perhaps the author felt compelled to make each story as unique as each set of 'bookends' was. It's as though he was showing off his new concept, and it has taken off, and I can only recommend it if you want to see many examples of how it's done.