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Experimental fiction

 Subject
Subject Source: Sackner Database

Found in 88 Collections and/or Records:

The Book of Breething, 1970

 Item
Identifier: CC-21034-21443
Scope and Contents

This book was illustrated by Bob Gale. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Dates: 1970

The Christine Brooke-Rose Omnibus: Four Novels, 1986

 Item
Identifier: CC-21306-21716
Scope and Contents

The four novels are titled: "Out," "Such," "Between," and "Thru." -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Dates: 1986

The Ends of our Tethers: 13 Sorry Stories, 2003

 Item
Identifier: CC-42814-44854
Scope and Contents The dust jacket depicts a naked self portrait of Gray and a muse that appears to be Morag McAlpine, his wife. The Sackners met them in Glasgow in 2004. Kirkus Reviews stated: "A most curious collection of semiautobiographical stories, from the veteran Scots author (the Whitbread-winner Poor Things, 1993; etc.) and graphic artist. The tales feature different protagonists and narrators, but the dominant one is a long-married (sometimes divorced) male approaching old age, taking stock of his (disappointing) life, and drawing resentful contrasts between vigorous youth and enfeebled age. There are terse, flimsy vignettes like "Pillow Talk," which portrays a husband trying to goad his wife into leaving him; a memory of "failures of common decency" that blighted a schoolboy's childhood ("Sinkings"); and a description of a peace march ("15 February 2003") that's only an excuse for lambasting Bush-and-Blair's Iraq policies. Several stories address the volume's themes more directly, and...
Dates: 2003

The First Fragment: The Case for the Burial of Ancestors Book 1, 1985

 Item — Box 302: [Barcode: 31858073143590]
Identifier: CC-00117-121
Scope and Contents

Three wooden objects and a thimble are placed upright in a bed of beige colored gravel like a dessert landscape. The text is rubberstamped on paper inside the lid and reads "I am the grain of truth...I hold the vessels of history and shatter them at Inside the lid is a small coffin-like wooden box; a black box on the outside has a metal capital "F." This sculpture symbolizes the puppeteer, a founder of an imaginary civilization, the Hegamons, who is described on p. 17 of the book in the title. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Dates: 1985

The Poetics of Indeterminacy, 1981

 Item
Identifier: CC-30101-31499
Scope and Contents

In this book, Perloff traces the history of modern poetry mainly through such poets as Rimbaud, Apollinaire, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Sanuel Beckett, John Ashbery, David Antin and John Cage. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Dates: 1981

The True Life of Sweeney Todd, 1973

 Item
Identifier: CC-15037-15354
Scope and Contents

This is a collage novel with words. It contrasts to Max Ernst's collage novels that are written without words. The copious number of illustrations for the novel consist of copperplate engravings collages mostly taken from issues of the Illustrated London News 1860-1900. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Dates: 1973

The True Life of Sweeney Todd, 1977

 Item
Identifier: CC-15038-15355
Scope and Contents

This is a reprinting of the hard cover book published by Gabberbochus. The copious number of illustrations for the novel consist of copperplate engravings collages mostly taken from issues of the Illustrated London News 1860-1900. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Dates: 1977

The Tunnel, 1995

 Item
Identifier: CC-10643-10852
Scope and Contents This novel deals with self-revelations of an American academic who is trying to write an introduction for a book that he has just completed, "Guilt and Innocence in Hutler's Germany." The book can be opened to almost any page and read as fragments of self-contained poetry. It has many Joycean elements in its presentation.Reviews in Dalkey Archive at their Web site:by H. L. HixWilliam H. Gass's The Tunnel, whatever its virtues, is not an inviting book. Even a reader willing to endure its length and its narrator's unrelenting bitterness must overcome its subordination of plot to other concerns: the book does not proceed from a to b along a "straight line" of narrative or exposition, revealing all relevant information before or as it is needed, but moves in a less ordered (or differently ordered) way that its author conceives as a more accurate replication of human consciousness. Its releasing and withholding information with little regard for plot means that The Tunnel offers more to...
Dates: 1995

The Tunnel, 1995

 Item
Identifier: CC-10644-10853
Scope and Contents

This novel deals with self-revelations of an American academic who is trying to write an introduction for a book that he has just completed, "Guilt and Innocence in Hutler's Germany." The book can be opened to almost any page and read as fragments of self-contained poetry. It has many Joycean elements in its presentation. This version of the book has a collaged yellow Jewish star on page 30 with the inscription "JUDE" whereas the purchased version on its release did not. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Dates: 1995

The Unfortunates, 1969

 Item
Identifier: CC-32501-34078
Scope and Contents

This novel consists of a first and last section, four and six pages in length, respectively. The other sections range from one to 12 pages in length. The reader is instructed to read the first and last sections of the book in their order while reading the other 25 sections in random order. The story revolves around a football reporter who visits a city and regains lost memories of the time he spent there many years before with a friend and his wife. Insofar as the page layout, Johnson utilizes wide spacing between words for paragraphs or dashes. Marc Saporta also published a novel, "Composition No.1," (1963) translated from the French in the same format as this book, unbound pages meant to be read in any order. Saporta's book is also held by the Sackner Archive. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Dates: 1969

The Voice in the Closet/La Voix dans le Cabinet de Debarras, 1979

 Item
Identifier: CC-12854-13143
Scope and Contents

The main text is printed in English and then on the flip side of the book, in French. It seems to be a memoir of Federman's experience in anti-Semitic France before WWII. The center portion of the book is a text by Maurice Roche "Echos," which is written in run-on French with each page reprinted in mirror image on the verso side. The text is unpunctuated. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Dates: 1979

The Voice in the Closet/La Voix dans le Cabinet de Debarrase, 1979

 Item
Identifier: CC-12853-13142
Scope and Contents

The main text is printed in English and then on the flip side of the book, in French. It seems to be a memoir of Federman's experience in anti-Semitic France before WWII. The center portion of the book is a text by Maurice Roche "Echos," which is written in run-on French with each page reprinted in mirror image on the verso side. The text is unpunctuated. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Dates: 1979

Things / A Man Asleep, 1990

 Item
Identifier: CC-31441-32931
Scope and Contents

The book consists of two novels. Things deals with a young French lower middle class couple in the post-WWII era who are marketing researchers. They want to be acquire possessions but do not have the necessary job skills or work ethnic to become wealthy. A Man Asleep is an existensionlist story about a nameless person that is written entirely in the second voice. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Dates: 1990

Three, 1996

 Item
Identifier: CC-43944-46055
Scope and Contents

Three short stories were published in one volume as suggested by Georg Perec to his publisher shortly before his death in in 1982 at the age of 46. The stories are titled, "The Exeter Text: Jewels, Secrets, Sex," "Which Moped with Chrome-Plated Handlebars at the Back of the Yard ?" and "A Gallery Portrait." The Exeter Text is the opposite of the lipogram, "A Void" in that it is written using only the vowel 'e.' -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Dates: 1996

Three, 2004

 Item
Identifier: CC-44199-46325
Scope and Contents

Three short stories were published in one volume as suggested by Georg Perec to his publisher shortly before his death in in 1982 at the age of 46. The stories are titled, "The Exeter Text: Jewels, Secrets, Sex," "Which Moped with Chrome-Plated Handlebars at the Back of the Yard ?" and "A Gallery Portrait." The Exeter Text is the opposite of the lipogram, "A Void" in that it is written using only the vowel 'e.' -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Dates: 2004

Towards the City Fragments I-VII, 1977

 Item — Box 312: [Barcode: 31858072490828]
Identifier: CC-26112-26574
Scope and Contents

Abstract markings and letter pictures were done by Bob Cobbing. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Dates: 1977