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BRUT
Harold Jaffe is well-known for his docufiction, which is at once personal and detached, serious and satirical, familiar and esoteric. He has been recognized for pinpointing and even aestheticizing the media pathology that informs and increasingly determines our daily lives. In BRUT, Jaffe addresses an extraordinary range of films, writers, painters, philosophers, and “outsider” artists, each with the brevity, clarity, and dramatic understatement that typify his prose. Nina Simone, Marlon Brando, Albert Camus, the Black Panthers, Angela Davis, Jean Genet, Sylvia Plath, Clarice Lispector, Dick Gregory, James Baldwin, Simone de Beauvoir, Mark Rothko, Alberto Giacometti, William Blake, Greta Thunberg, Frantz Fanon, Antonin Artaud, Man Ray, Dada, Che Guevara, John Coltrane, Pasolini … in every instance, it is not just the mind of the artist, but the heart-mind, the felt passion, that Jaffe teases out of his subject with uncanny nuance.
144 pages, Paperback
Published November 1, 2020
12 people want to read
About the author
Harold Jaffe
88 books29 followersHarold Jaffe is the author of 22 books, including nine fiction collections, one nonfiction collection, and three novels.
Jaffe's fiction has appeared in such journals as The Mississippi Review, City Lights Review, The Paris Review, New Directions in Prose and Poetry, Chicago Review, Chelsea, Fiction, Central Park, Witness, Black Ice, Minnesota Review, Boundary 2, ACM, Black Warrior Review, Cream City Review, Two Girls' Review, and New Novel Review. His stories have been anthologized in Pushcart Prize, Best American Stories, Best of American Humor, Storming the Reality Studio, American Made, Avant Pop: Fiction for a Daydreaming Nation, After Yesterday's Crash: The Avant-Pop Anthology, Bateria and Am Lit (Germany), Borderlands (Mexico), Praz (Italy), Positive (Japan), and elsewhere.
His novels and stories have been translated into German, Japanese, Spanish, French, Dutch, Czech, and Serbo-Croatian.
Harold Jaffe has won two NEA grants in fiction, a New York CAPS grant, a California Arts Council fellowship in fiction, and a San Diego fellowship (COMBO) in fiction.
Jaffe teaches literature at San Diego State University and is editor of Fiction International.
Jaffe's fiction has appeared in such journals as The Mississippi Review, City Lights Review, The Paris Review, New Directions in Prose and Poetry, Chicago Review, Chelsea, Fiction, Central Park, Witness, Black Ice, Minnesota Review, Boundary 2, ACM, Black Warrior Review, Cream City Review, Two Girls' Review, and New Novel Review. His stories have been anthologized in Pushcart Prize, Best American Stories, Best of American Humor, Storming the Reality Studio, American Made, Avant Pop: Fiction for a Daydreaming Nation, After Yesterday's Crash: The Avant-Pop Anthology, Bateria and Am Lit (Germany), Borderlands (Mexico), Praz (Italy), Positive (Japan), and elsewhere.
His novels and stories have been translated into German, Japanese, Spanish, French, Dutch, Czech, and Serbo-Croatian.
Harold Jaffe has won two NEA grants in fiction, a New York CAPS grant, a California Arts Council fellowship in fiction, and a San Diego fellowship (COMBO) in fiction.
Jaffe teaches literature at San Diego State University and is editor of Fiction International.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
October 31, 2021
A MULTI-LEVELED, INTUITIVE, AND HISTORIC INVESTIGATION OF LITERATURE AND ART
BRUT is an extremely insightful and nuanced survey of art, emotion, aesthetics, and the dynamics which inform and motivate them. Jaffe’s fictional commentaries on writers and artists is a voice of conscience and interconnectivity, evoking the essence of creative spirit and sacrifice. He addresses a full spectrum of art, in a sectioned yet panoramic exploration, part fly-on-the-wall and part telepathy, His themes are vast yet incisive, emotional and visceral, transcending historical boundaries and leading to a gestalt conception of our world—especially as it relates to artistic “seers”—of whom Jaffe himself is a fine example.
BRUT addresses beauty, energy, evil, racism, cruelty, poetry, music, perception, predicament, humanity, animalia, birth, death, victimization, victory, and many other arenas. The individual texts in the work, named after historic figures, function in an array of innovative modalities—predicament, meditation, dichotomy, coalescence—and often shuttle between and among these reference points. And while the texts are highly individuated, taken together they present an artistic essence: a combination of visceral experience, aesthetic choices, and divine madness. BRUT is marked by near-extrasensory tendrils of artistic commentary and linguistic power. Unequivocally, it offers artistic insights from dramatically new and incisive narrative perspectives.
BRUT is an extremely insightful and nuanced survey of art, emotion, aesthetics, and the dynamics which inform and motivate them. Jaffe’s fictional commentaries on writers and artists is a voice of conscience and interconnectivity, evoking the essence of creative spirit and sacrifice. He addresses a full spectrum of art, in a sectioned yet panoramic exploration, part fly-on-the-wall and part telepathy, His themes are vast yet incisive, emotional and visceral, transcending historical boundaries and leading to a gestalt conception of our world—especially as it relates to artistic “seers”—of whom Jaffe himself is a fine example.
BRUT addresses beauty, energy, evil, racism, cruelty, poetry, music, perception, predicament, humanity, animalia, birth, death, victimization, victory, and many other arenas. The individual texts in the work, named after historic figures, function in an array of innovative modalities—predicament, meditation, dichotomy, coalescence—and often shuttle between and among these reference points. And while the texts are highly individuated, taken together they present an artistic essence: a combination of visceral experience, aesthetic choices, and divine madness. BRUT is marked by near-extrasensory tendrils of artistic commentary and linguistic power. Unequivocally, it offers artistic insights from dramatically new and incisive narrative perspectives.
Displaying 1 of 1 review