The following is a draft excerpt from my novel in progress, Housebreaking the Muse. The novel is haunted by the character of Jacques Rigaut, the French dadaist, gigolo, drug addict, dandy, and suicide. In this fragment, Maxime Fraçois-Poncet begins to say his piece. Poncet was a boyhood friend of Rigaut, who believed he shared a…
New Fiction From Mark Seinfelt: Baldr and Beatrice
Praised for his works of historical fiction, notably Symphonie Fantastique and Henry Boulanger of Mushannon Town: A Novel of the American Revolution, Mark Seinfelt has ventured afield to give us Baldr and Beatrice, an impressive appropriation of Norse legend. In this telling, Seinfelt unravels a rich and subtle analysis of the psychology of friendship and…
J.R. Learns of the Death of His Friend Max — Excerpt from Housebreaking the Muse
The following is a draft excerpt from my novel in progress, Housebreaking the Muse. Here, Ubu peeks into the state of mind of Jacques Rigaut, who has just received a letter informing him of the death his very close friend, Maxime Fraçois-Poncet, killed while serving at the front near Boudry. Plunged into the gritty nebulae…
Thoughts …
“Look at him swing that freaking arm!” Blessed by the heavens, our town had its own human metronome by whom we set the tempo of our days. Fuzzy and disheveled, The Arm loped along warren and thoroughfare alike, always a clutch of worn paperbacks in left hand as if in counterbalance to the exaggerated arc…
A Different Sort of X-Mas II (updated)
Tired of the same old Christmas rut? Me too--and then some! As a non-believer, I've gone through various stages since first walking out on an X-mas Mass, and the Church altogether, a little over 30 years ago, when a fat pig priest (didn't even have the requisite "sanctimonious smile") started talking A-bombs and calling down…
Ed Desautels' Maximum Fiction 