Fiction & Literary Works

George Quasha

In Ainu Dreams, poet George Quasha and buun, a Japanese artist living in America, collaborate in poetically manifesting the artist’s richly articulated dream-life. These eighty-odd poems embody an ever-opening cosmos of curious image, surprising narrative, and enigmatic “teaching” in a language no one could have dreamed up alone. Structurally intriguing poems reveal the innards of the dreams themselves, yet always speak directly and readably, sometimes addressed to a second person (the poet? the reader?). The poems and even reading itself seem to be dreaming.

Franz Kamin

In this richly integrated collection of stories, poems, & other texts, the intermedial composer-performer Franz Kamin generates a personal mythos out of his musical, mathematical, biographical, & mystical concerns.

“Once, while I was listening to a lecture on dreams, I noticed that the girl in front of me had fallen asleep on her arms. Where was she then? It would be gentle to guess that Franz Kamin is busy exploring the geography of her elsewhere. Yet the force in his work is like that of all the other explorers, whose images become gentle and benign only in hindsight (Audubon, for instance, fleeced Keats’ brother at cards). It is transgressive, impatient of the natives, hasty, not yet polished up for presentation to the Socit’ d’Ailleurs. Here are his travel diaries, still stained with blood and lime squash.” – Robert Kelly

David Green

David Green’s novel furthers the contemporary dialogue between “deconstructionist” philosophy and “post-modern” fiction with an ingenious structure. It is difficult to tell whether a certain author of “Borgesian” fictions has invented the critic who writes about him, or if an ingenious critic has invented the author about whom he is a leading expert. Crisp critical prose alternates with lush narrative and descriptive rhetoric in this work of genuine inquiry into the relation between two styles of writing, two uses of mind, and two ways of being. Shades of Nabokov’s Pale Fire…

Michael Greene

Bataille’s Wound is a fictional presentation of the thought of a central modern French thinker and novelist, showing him as a radical teacher and mentor. George Bataille was a highly controversial writer associated with the Surrealist movement and—in writing often considered by turns pornographic and brilliant—concerned with moral transgression and the authenticity of inner experience. Greene uses quotation, paraphrase, and the recreation of Bataille’s celebrated style to further the spirit of that work.

Spencer Holst

A legendary storyteller and writer who has charmed New York audiences for decades, Holst first evolved his oeuvre in the 1950s-60s milieu of Greenwich Village, influenced as much by sophisticated poets/writers (e.g. Hart Crane, Jorge Luis Borges) as by fairy tales/tall-tales which his writings superficially resemble. Each of his sentences, paragraphs, and very, very short stories is a complete and independent act of narrative that delivers the very essence of narrative fiction. In spite of their brevity, these are works of great variety and complexity, displaying a fine intelligence and an inexhaustible capacity for verbal surprise. Holst breaks the very frame of what a story is and what language can do.

Leslie Kaplan

Originally published in France in 1987, this is the first English translation of Leslie Kaplan’s haunting novel about the meaning of childhood and the mysteriously intimate interworkings of child and adult….Here four adults and a child come together in a chance meeting in New York’s Central Park, where the child’s presence is a question to all of them. The novel pursues the erotic complexity of their various relationships with a special focus on the disturbing interaction between Julien and the child Nathalie. Woven through the affecting depictions of human characters, is the extraordinary depiction of the city, its tensions, its unexpected necessities, its urgencies. Written in a rhythm as electric as its setting, Brooklyn Bridge is a novel for the questioning child in us all.

David Matlin

These poems and prose texts confront the bewilderments and emergencies of ordinary life, for which we never seem to be prepared and which leave us in danger of becoming ghosts of our own exhaustion. A stark, enraged humor gives the work a brutal yet strangely delicate physical presence. “His work is remarkable for its imagery, often startling and violent, but always vividly real.” -Helen Adams

Essential Reading for anyone who has ever loved the Grateful Dead, Crazy Wisdom Tales for Dead Heads takes aim at readers who are captivated by trickster and prankster stories with a deep resonance and the scent of enlightenment. In the tradition of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters of the 60’s, the Guide is a collection of magical, mystical, entertaining, and amusingly bizarre stories. Designed to bring forth an interactive experience for the reader, it creates a sense of being on an imaginative Trip into the hidden zones of crazy wisdom, where Startled Awareness awaits. Stories include unusual rituals, absurd prescriptions for action, and graphic illustrations. This uproarious self-help book creates its own genre – humorous, shamanic, rock-oriented, transformative fiction.

Robert Kelly

The Cruise of the Pnyx is an enigmatic and urbane work in prose, verse, and an original typographic marriage of the two. The author describes the work as “a narrative poem bearing in from the afterlife; being born is finding this island.”

Elizabeth Cunningham

Always an imaginative writer, as The Return of the Goddess (1992) and The Wild Mother (1993) attest, in Daughter of the Shining Isles, Cunningham now mixes Celtic mythology with the emergent feminist tradition of the Magdalen to create a powerful, spiritually charged visionary novel. Daughter of the Shining Isles gives us a Mary Magdalen for our times: Maeve, a feisty Celt, raised by warrior witches to a life of heroism. When she arrives on a magical Druid island, she meets her cosmic twin (J)Esus of Nazareth. Together they become embroiled in an adventure of passion, betrayal, and human sacrifice. Sure to stir controversy, it brings fresh insight into the lost years of the young man called Esus, and the vital young woman who was his equal. Profoundly moving and often outrageously funny, Cunningham’s new novel is storytelling of the highest caliber. Maeve is sure to claim her place among the great literary heroines of our age.

Maurice Blanchot

This long awaited reprint of a book about which John Hollander wrote: “A masterful version of one of the most remarkable novels in any language since World War II,” is the story of the narrator’s relations with two women, one terminally ill, the other found motionless by him in a darkened room after a bomb explosion has separated them. “Through more than 40 years, the French writer Maurice Blanchot has produced an astonishing body of fiction and criticism,” writes Gilbert Sorrentino in the New York Review of Books, and John Updike in The New Yorker: “Blanchot’s prose gives an impression, like Henry James, of carrying meanings so fragile they might crumble in transit.”

Fred Dortort

This meticulous, close reading of the entire of William Blake’s great prophetic poem, “Jerusalem,” challenges almost every extant critical assumption about this poem, from the function of the figures Los and Entitharmon to the belief that in Jerusalem Blake is finally reconciled with Christianity. In the face of decades of continuing efforts to domesticate and normalize Blake’s poetry, The Dialectic of Vision seeks to reaffirm, in the strongest possible terms — its spirit, as well as its uniquely organized coherence and astonishing relevance for our time.

Alan Sondheim

This collection of writing represents, in Sondheim’s words, “a basic text for postmodern poets.”

Sondheim states, “My approach would describe something like the impossible search for the grounds of the Self in sexuality and ideology; the hysteria of the loss of speech; a work situated between poetry and theory that extends the boundaries of theory itself; ‘the poetry of deconstruction’; ‘the narrative of loss’ …”

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Jalal Toufic

The author, son of an Iraqi father and a Palestinian mother, lived in Lebanon for 17 years; this extraordinary fictionalized memoir derives much of its intensity from Toufic’s exposure to three of the world’s most devastated peoples. Viewing life through the eyes of Nietzsche and Kafka, he deftly turns sitting in a cafe into an autobiographical narrative blended with philosophy and observations on cinema gleaned from his own experience as a filmmaker. The text turns on a metaphoric excavation of an always underway process or state of ‘distraction’– A state which for Toufic is not so much an attitude or level of concentration as it is an ontological modality. Insightful, funny, erotic, at times bizarre,Distracted offers an indelible vision of daily life by a man born on the twin currents of art and history.

Franz Kamin

EGZ Book of Frogs was originally written by “Uncle Franz” for the child (EGZ) that lives inside his adult friend Eve Rosenthal; and was illustrated by another friend, Kathy Bourbonais. This and several other little stories were later set to music for the mime and flute team of Jane Adler and Andrew Bolotowsky. The book is available either with or without a recording (7 inch LP) of these pieces. Also available from Station Hill Press: Franz Kamin’s book Ann Margret Loves You and 12 inch LP Behavioral Drift II/ Rugugmool.

Peter Lamborn Wilson

Are these texts shadows of the real? Or are they only false documents? “Incunablula” and “Ong’s Hat” first appeared in the 1980s and spawned a mini-industry of conspiracy lit, several scholarly books, even a kids’ TV series (“Gakidor”), and a rock band (“Ong’s Hat”). Here are the original “legendary” texts, along with various and sundry other alternative histories, bad translations and anarchist ephemera, plus several previously unpublished works, including an entire Sci-Fi novel: Lunar Mansion or, the Whole Rabbit (based on Cornelius Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy, which was used to generate the plot).

A robust textual creativity resonates a region of magical transmutation, political possibility, and spiritual adventure, so that the whole collection vibrates and pulses with the flavors of the real. A “false” document would seem to involve a contradiction, since being false, it is no document at all. But documentation is no more possible than the articulation of some absolutely verifiable condition of Being itself. Peter Lamborn Wilson seems to have documented this condition with consummate probity.

—Charles Stein, author of There Where You Do Not Think to Be Thinking and transl. The Odyssey

Peter Lamborn Wilson is the very model of the outlaw scholar. Operating outside the stultifying atmosphere of academia, drawing on research and knowledge that is both wide and deep, and writing in clear and vivid prose blessedly free of jargon, Wilson charts the secret histories of this world and others.

—Rachel Pollack, writer, winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the World Fantasy Award

Nina Bouraoui grew up in a liberal university milieu, completely unlike the one she describes in Forbidden Vision. Because of the strength of her memories, both good and bad, of her years spent in Algeria, and her own Algerian roots, she wanted her first novel to be about that country. Eager to portray Algerian society and character as she describes them — “boiling,” “dangerous,” “exciting”

Kyoko Hayashi and Eiko Otake, Translator

FROM TRINITY TO TRINITY recounts the pilgrimage of Japanese atomic-bomb survivor Kyoko Hayashi to the Trinity Site in northern New Mexico, where the world’s first atomic bomb test was conducted. Her journey takes her into unfamiliar terrain, both past and present, as she not only confronts American attitudes, disconcertingly detached from the suffering of nuclear destruction, but discovers as well a profound kinship with desert plants and animals, the bomb’s “first victims.” Translator Eiko Otake, a renowned artist in dance (Eiko & Koma), offers further insight into Hayashi’s life and work, illuminating how her identity as “outsider” helped shape her vision. Together author and translator present one woman’s transformation from victim to witness, a portrait of endurance as a power of “being” against all odds.

George Quasha and Charles Stein

This essay, discussing a two-part installation at Galerie des Archives in Paris by the internationally celebrated artist, Gary Hill, explores the enigmatic nature of the work of art as an object and of objects in general, as such issues pertain to Hill’s work and these installations in particular. The text is by two well-known poet/artists who have a long history of association and collaboration with Gary Hill. This book is handsomely illustrated with photographs of the installation and other relevant works by Hill and is presented in a bilingual, French-English edition.

Excerpts from the text:

“There are works of art that require initiation. This does not mean that they require explanation, special consensus, or any other prescriptive bearing. It does mean that one must discover an _appropriate mode of entry_ which is more than informational. This can involve radical reorientation, as in the case of _HanD HearD_, which directly (but non-coercively) introduces us to the posture of awareness appropriate to our participation in the piece.”

“Considering more particularly the piece _HanD HearD_, we discover that its way of being a text imposes nothing on the mind, yet it offers an _image_ (a hand in front of a person’s face) as a possible _posture_ of awareness. And because the “text” has no “content” other than this posture, it grants the participant _direct access_ from the beginning.”

Maurice Blanchot and Lydia Davis, trans.

“When we come to write the history of criticism for the 1940 to 1980 period, it will be found that Blanchot, together with Sartre, made French “discourse” possible, both in its relentlessness and its acuity….This selection…is exemplary for its clearly translated and well-chosen excerpts from Blanchot’s many influential books. Reading him now, and in this form, I feel once more the excitement of discovering Blanchot in the 1950s…”-Geoffrey Hartman

Kathy Acker

This book begins when a young boy, Pip, learns he has come into great expectations. What these expectations actually are, or the change from the total disparity between Pip’s ideas of ‘expectations’ and what is real to Pip’s learning to feel, is the narrative of this plagiarized Bildungsroman.

Thus Great Expectations is both the story of a young boy’s introduction to the world and a profound examination of moral values. Written at a time when Acker’s relationship with society is in question, texts given by the society—Dickens, Proust, Flaubert, Reage, Victoria Holt, Keats—appear both as they were written and in a new and interrogative light. The whole culture is brought into question.

Out of the agony of the author’s total disenchantment, or plagiarism, appears beauty: given text is laid on given text; language is no longer used to control but to be; the reader touches language rather than is controlled by it; meaning changes to tapestry. This book is totally sensuous.

This book is “the most completely unified work of art Acker has yet produced. One that by its formal concentration and its unified shape at every depth of reading fulfills the sort of demands that Sterne or Canetti makes of the novelist.” – Alain Robbe-Grillet

Rosmarie Waldrop

Writing from America to her sister in Germany, the protagonist of this shattering first novel reconstructs the life of her parents—in the author’s words, “just those ‘ordinary people’ who helped Hitler rise.” Unflinching in her appraisal, she imagines how her father’s latent anti-Semitism was triggered by his wife’s affair with a Jew, who was later sent to a concentration camp. The tone darkens as the narrator realizes that she and her sisters are living out variants of their mother’s sexual model.

“Wonderfully, relentlessly absorbing, Hanky’s several overlapping tales leave one marvelling at the beauty, economy and humor with which Waldrop interweaves the complex tensions of Hitler’s Germany in a family drama of repeated infidelity. Delightfully rich and bawdy and as strong-willed as its characters.” -Lydia Davis

“Rosmarie Waldrop’s haunting novel, superbly intelligent, evocative and strange, reverberates in the memory for a long time, a song for the dead, a judgment.” -Angela Carter

Healing Fiction — meaning both “fiction that heals” and “the process of healing the fiction itself” — is a radical revision of the act of therapy. One of the most influential psychological writers of our time, Hillman conceives and practices therapy as an imaginative art, intimately bound with poetics — the making with words, fictioning. To heal the symptom, he argues, we must heal the person, and to heal the person we must first heal the story in which the person has imagined himself. Three essays “revision” the work of Freud, Jung and Adler through the role of fiction in their thought and practice.

Keith Waldrop

Vivid elements evoke remembered scenes or imagined constructions from history, dream or chance. Unlikely characters show up. A 15th century Dutch painter walks the streets of Providence; a young girl goes to sleep in a dark room; Charlemagne appears in a mythic terrain of sheer language. This is a distinctive poet’s prose, precise and congenial, capturing improbable moments and spinning the mind into new realms of possibility.

Maria Negroni

Islandia tells us of a race of exiled, conquering, Nordic heroes, who have landed on and settled an island (presumably Iceland) and remained there for generations, self-enthralled by their own identities as sung in their own Sagas. Islandia also tells us of the sophisticated and complexly ironical, lyrical verses of the author’s own persona, herself isolated, self-reflective, and exiled—in present-day New York City. These two tellings approach each other without ever quite touching, across a chasm of mutually re-enforcing but sharply distinct senses of absence. The work is brilliantly translated from the Spanish by Anne Twitty and is presented here in a bi-lingual edition.