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, the ground-breaking anthology that inspired the Literary Taxidermy Short Story Competition. By "re-stuffing" what goes in-between the opening and closing lines of classic works by Virginia Woolf, Richard Brautigan, Milan Kundera, Ian Fleming, and others, Mark Malamud has stitched together a wholly-original kind of fiction. You won't be disappointed. Learn more about literary taxidermy, as well as future contests, by visiting literarytaxidermy.com.

299 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 2, 2019

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.