Belighted Fiction

Book excerpt: In a literary world where we see the constant rush of lemmings diving gleefully off cliffs into the seas of mediocrity and convention, it is refreshing to find that there are creative writers out there who are willing to keep the lighthouse of the avant-garde lit. In this collection one finds fiction fulfilling its core purposes: to warn, to enlighten, to illuminate. As editor Eckhard Gerdes says in his foreword, if you're looking for conventions, buy yourself a fez! What you'll find here is thought-provoking and emotive work, charged with the spirit of delight and wonder as each new possibility is uncovered. This is, without a doubt, some of the best writing of our times. The works in this collection can rub elbows with the great and hold their own. If there is an afterlife, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Richard Brautigan, Italo Calvino, Laurence Sterne, Donald Barthelme, William S. Burroughs, Kathy Acker, Samuel Beckett, Kenneth Patchen, and Eugene Ionesco are all looking at this work and are nodding and smiling.