Bøker utgitt av Jef Books

CRITICAL PRAISE "Whatever you do, don¿t even look into Eckhard Gerdes' book, The Chronicles of Michel du Jabot, because you'll never get out of it again! If J. Joyce were to be reincarnated-and instead of writing in his inextricably reinvented and rather illegible (without the help of an East European multi-lingual scholar) Panglish, were to practice an altogether clear and charmingly grammatical English as here (admittedly with a scatter of soft linguistic implosions but few)-he would have written this book. It will take generations of English professors to sort it out. Hilarious semantic sport. And don't expect me to tell you what it is about. I would have to give you a involuted idio-semantic analysis with innumerable brackets and labels, which wouldn't help anyway. No, okay then, dare to tip-toe into the cavernous echoing brain-chamber of Gerdes' The Chronicles and if you're lucky you'll come tumbling out into the dull everydaylight with a mad enlightened gleam in your eyes and will never read another novel. Yes, this - not Finnegans Wake-is the novel to end the novel. -Alain Arias-Misson, author of Autobiography of a Character from Fiction "Have you seen whales frolicking in the sea-giant masses of shiny wet flesh gracefully rising up into the air and then just as gracefully plunging back into the water? They do it not to catch flies as trout do, food always on their tiny minds, but to delight at their ability to do it, delight at being whales. I rise and plunge, says the whale, therefore I am! And so it is with Eckhard Gerdes in his massive, whale tale kind of a book, The Chronicles of Michel du Jabot-he is not after seducing a reader or two with a suspenseful story into purchasing his book but to exercise the writer in himself, delight at his ability to use language. Gerdes is because he writes." -- Yuriy Tarnawsky, from the Introduction

Fiction. "The book's title, 'Return to Circa '96,' caught my attention right off. Themes of memory, time travel, and so forth were evoked. Then the visual appeal was quite marked (my professional and personal interests tilt in favor of scripto-visual works). The 'data-base aesthetics' (Lev Manovich) aspect of the work gave it a very contemporary Web 2.0 kind of technological relevance, which meshed well with the book's meta- fictional construction. These conceptual art-ish and surfictional elements lured me into the book. The library-as-a-framing-device, situating events within a repository of texts, hit a responsive chord given my own autodidactic / academic propensities. I felt at home in the text. The producer's mixtures of modalities of writing, a 'mulligan stew' of different textualities, were attributes of the kinds of works I read and re-read most often. Finally, the book was funny. It not only gave that 'writerly' jouissance touted by literary theorist Roland Barthes, but also the plaisir of a 'readerly' text. In short, in opening Mr. Sawatzki's book, it was as if I'd found a long-lost friend."--James R. Hugunin

Fiction. "Fiction + truth + p(r)o(s)etry, this is rest(less) lit at its finest, the alluring and intelligent story of abandonment & love & loving abandonment in the running text where Jane L. Carman both plays and don't play. Go, girl - watch the girl go: TANGLED IN MOTION masterfully allows its beauty and its beast(s) to take an alternate route in surviving shame, despite absolutely nothing being a breeze in her environment. Violent silence. The magnificent restorying/restoring of a girl who resides in margins of a marginalized. Completely unheard of... until now. Jane L. Carman must have had too much white space on her hands. 'Cause she knows how to really work it, turn that mutha out. This rest(less) thing, where sound is unbound and word is bond and Carman asks you to check it while she wrecks it, has got resounding style. As they say now on the vine, it is on fleek, just/perfect. Skunking anything else out there that I've ever seen in the game of novel ideas, Jane L. Carman puts her own personal stank on this. A funky-fresh narrative jam that's a must-have for anyone's collection. Taking chances unlike everybody else and they mama, unf(l)ailingly risking it all, Jane L. Carman rocks the house with this, TANGLED IN MOTION. En route to ridin' and dyin' for a better day, Carman leaves spit in her tracks. Foundation and shit all falls down while she, with that nonstop motor, just rides/writes away feeling free as a bird. This fly, phenomenal woman's book will absolutely give you the goosies. It's impossible not to idolize Carman for how she pulls this brainchild off with the ultimate swag. Both to the point and often even repeating itself, TANGLED IN MOTION is a real trip. Forging new territory in literature, its rebellion, so powerfully divergent from that of others, finally moves the canon in a forward direction. Carman's got it going on."--Ricardo Co