False Positive

by Harold Jaffe

Each of the fifteen fictions in False Positive originated as a nationally known newspaper story, which Harold Jaffe has "treated" to bring to its prosaic surface a maniacal subtext. The original stories cover the familiar American postmodern high school mass murders; sexual molestations; rock star suicides; internet police; serial killers on the loose. Jaffe enters each published version, and through rearrangement, nuanced rewriting, and strategic interpellations, exposes the host text's latent madness. Thus re-armed, Jaffe's prosthetic creation is released into our culture to do its unsettling work. Jaffe's fictive "treatment" of these everyday nightmares is ambitious and startling. He embeds his found story in his own heightened versions, leaving the traces of the original text alongside his own, or insinuates the ghostly presence of journalese within his own deadpan lines. As The San Diego Union has said of Jaffe's earlier fiction, False Positive is more "exquisite chaos from the master word processor of our generation."

Genres: Fiction, Read For School

140 pages, Paperback

First published February 11, 2002

About the author

Harold 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.

Reviews

[Nick Nettleton · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was very short, just over 100 pages. I got this from a book sale and just randomly picked it up. It has 15 short newspaper stories. They were mildly interesting. Most were about different people getting on death row/arrested and what their crimes were. It was alright, just decided to read it in one sitting.