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Avant-Pop: Fiction for a Daydream Nation
Avant-Pop is innovative fiction, comic book art, unique graphics, and various unclassifiable texts written by the most radical, subversive literary talents of the postmodern new wave. They include cult figures in the pop underground (Samuel R. Delany, Kathy Acker, Tim Ferret, Derek Pell, Harold Jaffe), important new writers who have gained prominence since the late eighties (Mark Leyner, Eurudice, William T. Vollmann), and the most promising new kids on the block ("rap fiction" master Ricardo Cortez Cruz—winner of the 1992 Nilon Award for Excellence in Minority Fiction—and Doug Rice, whose obscenely obsessive, Faulkner-meets-Acker prose is showcased here for the first time).
Avant-Pop will send a collective wake-up call to all those readers who have spent the last decade nodding off, along with the rest of America's daydream nation. Avant-Pop will actually reverse the numbing effects of years of exposure to the harmful emissions of television, movies, glossy magazines, and commercial bestsellers. Readers who decry the absence of a liberating radicalized art and have had it with our bland B-movie society of the spectacle will hop with the hip in Avant-Pop.
Avant-Pop will send a collective wake-up call to all those readers who have spent the last decade nodding off, along with the rest of America's daydream nation. Avant-Pop will actually reverse the numbing effects of years of exposure to the harmful emissions of television, movies, glossy magazines, and commercial bestsellers. Readers who decry the absence of a liberating radicalized art and have had it with our bland B-movie society of the spectacle will hop with the hip in Avant-Pop.
247 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1993
3 people are currently reading
117 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
January 30, 2009
I stumbled across this slim collection on the shelf of a used bookstore in Montreal, I'm not even sure why I picked it up. But I was intrigued, and then I was excited, and now I've ready as much as I can from almost all the authors featured in it. It's surprisingly consistent for such a disparate collection, experimental without ever bordering on the unreadable. I'm not sure I can recommend it to everyone, but I'm pretty sure no other book has been as influential on my reading habits since.
July 4, 2022
Re-read Jan 15-24, 2017
Short fictions that experiment with the conventions of narrative, of genre, of discourse and language, and of the print medium.
Many of the fictions in the first half of the book are about sex--its relation to identity and to language, for example, as well as to commodification and consumer society.
The fictions include:
An orgiastic re-enactment of the Passion;
A group of characters using sex as a form of expression and disruption;
A Situationist tracking down leads on the Internet and on the mean streets of a border town;
A journalist commenting on his experiences with alcohol;
A style guide that uses de Sade's writings as exempla;
And the collaborative introduction by editor McCaffery and contributor Kathy Acker that starts out as a pastiche of hard-boiled detective fiction before it turns into something else a little more daring.
With regard to the contributors to this book, there were a few (Mark Leyner, Samuel R. Delany, Acker) with whose work I have become somewhat familiar, having read some of their respective novels; other contributors (William T Vollmann, Harold Jaffe, for instance) I have only read in this collection, but I am interested in seeing more of their work.
I finished a few of these fictions without much of a clear sense of what they were about; with others, however, I was able to follow the action (or the play of signifiers) easily, and found what I was reading to be as entertaining as a more conventionally written fiction.
If you are a fan of writers like Thomas Pynchon, Donald Barthelme or William Gibson, you may like this one.
Acquired Nov 15, 2005
Powell's City of Books, Portland, OR
Short fictions that experiment with the conventions of narrative, of genre, of discourse and language, and of the print medium.
Many of the fictions in the first half of the book are about sex--its relation to identity and to language, for example, as well as to commodification and consumer society.
The fictions include:
An orgiastic re-enactment of the Passion;
A group of characters using sex as a form of expression and disruption;
A Situationist tracking down leads on the Internet and on the mean streets of a border town;
A journalist commenting on his experiences with alcohol;
A style guide that uses de Sade's writings as exempla;
And the collaborative introduction by editor McCaffery and contributor Kathy Acker that starts out as a pastiche of hard-boiled detective fiction before it turns into something else a little more daring.
With regard to the contributors to this book, there were a few (Mark Leyner, Samuel R. Delany, Acker) with whose work I have become somewhat familiar, having read some of their respective novels; other contributors (William T Vollmann, Harold Jaffe, for instance) I have only read in this collection, but I am interested in seeing more of their work.
I finished a few of these fictions without much of a clear sense of what they were about; with others, however, I was able to follow the action (or the play of signifiers) easily, and found what I was reading to be as entertaining as a more conventionally written fiction.
If you are a fan of writers like Thomas Pynchon, Donald Barthelme or William Gibson, you may like this one.
Acquired Nov 15, 2005
Powell's City of Books, Portland, OR
June 20, 2024
Very eccentric stories that I do not recommend for any public settings. The aura of the thing is cultivated by Larry McCaffery very well. There is an underworld type of feeling that looms beginning at the middle of the first story, done by McCaffery himself, that really plunges you into the abyss. It’s definitely one of the realest things I’ve ever picked up. Everything from the characters to the greater themes are candid and provocative. The range of quality between some authors is noticeable i.e. samuel delany smoking the competition, but it’s all on the spectrum of entertaining to captivating so no complaints.
August 23, 2016
Read this like 20+ years ago. I remember being disappointed.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews