Bøker av Harold Jaffe

Harold Jaffe is a master of the disembodied voice. These fictions-transgressive, political, dryly comic-are grounded in an ancient tradition, that of the speech of the storyteller. Interlocutors talk as if out of dark caves, and the result is a marvel of conversation that takes the reader to places somehow beyond the "real world," only to comment, often searingly, upon its absurdities.

How much dexterity does a writer need to write a "story" in a single sentence? In their virtuosic collection, brevity masters Harold Jaffe and Tom Whalen, drawing from a host of injustices currently at play on our teetering earth, meet this challenge with a variety of formal strategies: prose poems, micro-fictions, creation myths, pensées, headlines, fables, fragments, quotations, and graffiti. With its nuanced, often antiphonal structure, readers of Single-Sentence Stories will be engaged, entertained and informed by this unique collaboration.

"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."--Back cover

If you enjoy the show Mind Hunter-Taking as his text Georges Bataille's insight that "only at the extremes is there freedom," critically acclaimed "guerrilla writer" Harold Jaffe documents Bataille's aperçu with 15 bone-chilling illustrations. Manson, Starkweather, Speck, Son of Sam, the Night Stalker, Aileen Wuornos, the Unabomber, Dahmer, Bundy, Gacy, Kemper, Kevorkian and Kissinger are not merely present and accounted for, they are rendered into a "reality TV" that you've never seen before.Widely praised as a virtuoso stylist, Jaffe employs a number of narrative stratagems, such as letters, monologues, interviews and "unsituated dialogues" to torque the flattened, cartoon-like serial killers into a potently unnerving third dimension.As in False Positive, Straight Razor, Eros Anti-Eros and Sex for the Millennium, Jaffe's "docufictions" are at the same time lucid, intricate, gruesome, infinitely sad, and hilarious. At the end we are left with a profoundly incisive commentary on America's insatiable consumption of extremity, conveniently masked as moral condemnation."As in previous works by Jaffe, 15 Serial Killers looks at serial killers through a unique point of view that resists glamorization, and it is effective at reaching deeply into the hic et nuc of the situation…one cannot but admire Jaffe's courage (and gall) in using these notorious figures as the inspiration for "docufiction." The potential of 'docufiction' is philosophically and narratologically rich."-American Book Review"Certain parts of the book had me wondering if he was actually there, hanging out with the killers, sharing a six-pack with them, and watching the way they tore their victims apart. 15 Serial Killers is a flashback into America's horrid past, delightfully written so the reader can relate to the fifteen psychopaths Jaffe describes, and sometimes becomes."-Stephanie Simpson-Woods, The Midwest Book Review

As in Harold Jaffe's two previous "docufiction" collections, False Positive and 15 Serial Killers, the author of Terror-Dot-Gov selects then "treats" his texts such that the reader is incapable of distinguishing between fact and fiction. That ambiguity permits Jaffe to cunningly tease out the contradictions and subtexts of official "news" or "information" and torque it into what it so often is fundamentally: jingoism, xenophobia and propaganda.Jaffe's subject in Terror-Dot-Gov is not the everywhere-represented "illicit" terrorism so much as "licit," institutionalized terrorism, and he assaults his subject from multiple angles: razor-sharp satire, precisely cadenced rhetoric, faux-reportage, and "unsituated" dialogues (Jaffe's term, referring to his trademark talking heads with perfect pitch). The result is virtuosic and paradoxical: a prodigious display of firepower-in the cause of peace.