I've prepared this essay for the 4th Biennial &Now Festival of Innovative Writing & the Literary Arts, to be held this week in Buffalo, NY. I'll be joining Anne-Laure Tissut, Dimitri Anastasopoulos, Dave Kress, and Christina Milletti for "Purple Brain: A Paul West Panel." The essay recalls some of my fond memories of Paul, and…
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…
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…
The following is a short short story I wrote years ago as a kind of crazy, Americanized homage to the style of the great Austrian novelist, Thomas Bernhard. It was inspired by the transvestites who used to hang out at the Savoy Restaurant in Philadelphia during my time there in the mid 80s. It was…
The following is excerpted from Manifesto: Maximalist Expressionism, or "Shut/-/Up(!) Fiction". As to what transpires in my novel Flicker in the Porthole Glass, I’ve been asked point blank: Does anything happen in this novel? My answer: The novel happens in this novel. In his book of essays, For a New Novel, Alain Robbe-Grillet sums up…
Ed Desautels' Maximum Fiction 