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Journal of Experimental Fiction
Website of the Publisher of the Foremost in Fiction
Good news for JEF! We have entered a new phase in our development, and we will now be working in cahoots with Civil Coping Mechanisms, an exciting press out of Michigan, to bring you more JEF more frequently and to expand our publishing of novels! The first of these will be JEF 40, Ambiguity, Frederick Mark Kramer's brilliant follow-up, to JEF 33, Apostrophe/Parenthesis. CCM will be publishing and distributing our titles, but yours truly will still edit the JEF-sponsored titles within CCM! Please see copingmechanisms.net for continuing updates about JEF and about CCM's many other fine projects!
Here is some praise from one of our regular contributors and readers!
The Journal of Experimental Fiction, or how to kill your postman
The postman nearly knocked the door down this morning. “I’ve been off for two weeks, and the round is killing me”, he said, out of breath and dripping sweat onto his recorded delivery pad, “I don’t know what’s worse, the temperature or carrying packages as heavy as this”. I printed and signed in the best handwriting possible while clutching a kitten at the same time. As he handed me the package I deduced from its address label what was inside, I thought that it might be conceptually heavy, but I was surprised by its physical bulk. It is best that the postman doesn’t know that the package contained the new issue of the Journal of Experimental Fiction otherwise our post might start getting accidentally lost.
The Journal of Experimental Fiction is edited by Eckhard Gerdes, and it is evident from its 280 page count that it is a labour of love and a result of some serious consideration. Between the minimalist white gloss covers of the new issue, Volume 35, the work of seventeen writers present the results of typographic, linguistic and conceptually experimental approaches to a variety of fiction forms. As with most experimental writing you do have to spend time with some of it, but most of it is openly accessible which I always think is the way to gauge the success or failure of the experiment. The highlight for me is the revised republication of Hart Broudy’s 1976 work ‘5c Utopia’, a kind of concrete poetry novella in a fictional graphic diary form. My contribution is ‘Six Pieces’ – early and newer versions of work, some of which was collected together in my book ‘Almost Nearly’ (of which there are no more copies, until a publisher decides to release it in a new edition).
So, if experimental writing is your thing then check this out and support the hard work put in by Eckhard in tirelessly helping to bring this kind of work to a wider audience. And if you’ve never read any experimental fiction then this journal is the place to start exploring. You can buy a copy from the American Amazon link below – just pity your poor postman.
--Nathan Penlington
http://www.amazon.com/Jour
The Journal of Experimental Fiction is edited by Eckhard Gerdes, and it is evident from its 280 page count that it is a labour of love and a result of some serious consideration. Between the minimalist white gloss covers of the new issue, Volume 35, the work of seventeen writers present the results of typographic, linguistic and conceptually experimental approaches to a variety of fiction forms. As with most experimental writing you do have to spend time with some of it, but most of it is openly accessible which I always think is the way to gauge the success or failure of the experiment. The highlight for me is the revised republication of Hart Broudy’s 1976 work ‘5c Utopia’, a kind of concrete poetry novella in a fictional graphic diary form. My contribution is ‘Six Pieces’ – early and newer versions of work, some of which was collected together in my book ‘Almost Nearly’ (of which there are no more copies, until a publisher decides to release it in a new edition).
So, if experimental writing is your thing then check this out and support the hard work put in by Eckhard in tirelessly helping to bring this kind of work to a wider audience. And if you’ve never read any experimental fiction then this journal is the place to start exploring. You can buy a copy from the American Amazon link below – just pity your poor postman.
--Nathan Penlington
http://www.amazon.com/Jour
