Fountain of youth? Or deal with the devil? Iggy's 61 in this Isle of Wight performance in 2008. My goal for 2010 is to have this much energy at 47 as Iggy had at 61.
Is Satire Possible if the Signifier is Truly Dead?
The world may never know! However, Davis Schneiderman's literal-satirical, quasi-Dadaist deconstructions perhaps best the opaque dead-end offerings of monsieur Derrida(da) by virtue of a direct appeal to the senses and a nostalgic harkening to a 1970s Saturday Night Live comic sensibility. Here, Schneiderman is joined by the late Raymond Federman and Lidia Yuknavitch for a…
East Somerville – Excerpt from Housebreaking the Muse
The following is an excerpt from my novel in progress, Housebreaking the Muse. Here, Ubu takes the narrative in a chapter that begins to flesh out the book's protagonist, Ray Burke. Burke wandered down Mass Ave. to Central Square, there catching a 91 bus heading north on Prospect out of Cambridge. Lights out on another…
Flicker in the Porthole Glass, a novel – Installment I
My novel Flicker in the Porthole Glass was published by MAMMOTH Books in 2002. The Review of Contemporary Fiction observed that, "...the achievement here is Desautels’s prose, an aural event both jagged and elegant, assaultive and inviting, that moves with the clipped, dangerous, urgent kinesis of hard bop jazz." Seven years down the road, I'm…
Craft Notes: Paul West’s Technical Advice for Fiction Writers, Part VIII
The novelist Paul West has had the greatest influence on my development as a writer. I first had the great fortune of encountering this member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, winner of the Prix Médicis and the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, Literary Lion of the New York Public Library system, and…
Ed Desautels' Maximum Fiction 