Temporary Culture is pleased to announce the forthcoming publication of
MY MAN & OTHER CRITICAL FICTIONS
by Wendy Walker
Publication date : 25 October 2011
Original frontispiece portrait of Joseph Conrad and Wendy Walker by Joanna Ebenstein.
128 pp. Oblong 6-1/2 x 9-1/2 inches.
Twenty numbered copies will be specially bound by hand for subscribers and signed by the author and artist (details upon request).
Trade issue : hardcover, full cloth binding with printed dust jacket. ISBN 978-0-9764660-7-9 $22.50
(plus postage : $5.00 in U.S., $15.00 overseas). Trade discount available.
Special offer until 30 September : $22.50 includes shipping in U.S. for prepaid advance orders.
MY MAN is an original collection of 8 critical fictions on Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo, King Lear, Olaudah Equiano, Harry Mathews, and other writers and texts. The critical fiction is a literary mode that takes as its subject another literary work and treats of that work’s construction, obsessions, and sources in narrative and poetic, rather than expository/critical terms. Wendy Walker is one of the chief proponents of the critical fiction today ; some of her predecessors include Jean Rhys, Jorge Luis Borges, Angela Carter, and Guy Davenport.
WENDY WALKER is author of a modern masterpiece, The Secret Service (1992) ; a work of poetic non-fiction, Blue Fire (Proteotypes, 2009), exploring the case of Constance Kent ; and two collections of short fiction, The Sea-Rabbit, or, The Artist of Life (1988) and Stories out of Omarie (1995). Her website is wendywalker.com.
To celebrate publication of MY MAN & OTHER CRITICAL FICTIONS, Temporary Culture is pleased to convene a Critical Fiction Symposium on Tuesday 25 October 2011 at the Grolier Club in New York City. Participants will include Wendy Walker, Ron Janssen, Jennifer Nelson, John Crowley, and Henry Wessells. Details on the Symposium page.
“I do love the idea of critical fiction, as I think there’s no reason that … as literature has moved into a crucially newer age … criticism (i.e. response) shouldn’t move along with it … that the traditional essay cannot accommodate the way we think, the way we perceive, the way we use the language to talk about the language and all it contains. So critical fiction does just that.”