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In this incomparably brilliant and timeless masterpiece of
unrelenting cruelty, two unhappy souls; restless, tormented Rebecca
and the harmless mediocrity, McGeeee, find themselves caught in an
infinite regress of shifting identities and memories. Rebecca seeks
transcendence, an escape from a life she does not know how to live.
McGeeee, meanwhile, seems to have no self to speak of, wandering
from situation to situation without a sense of purpose. Their
relationship has multiple origins, infinite endings and no
conclusion. At the heart of this non-story is an unforgivable
family secret from generations past. It's none of your business,
but go on, have a peek, you cheeky bastard.
When Phil Jourdan's mother died suddenly in 2009, she left behind a
legacy of kindness and charity - but she also left unanswered some
troubling questions. Was she, as she once claimed, a spy? Had she
suffered more profoundly as a woman and parent than she'd let on?
Jourdan's recollections of his struggles with psychosis, and his
reconstructions of conversations with his enigmatic mother, form
the core of this memoir. Psychoanalysis, poetry and confession all
merge to tell the story of an ordinary woman whose death turned her
into a symbol for extraordinary motherhood.
This is the first collection of creative writing-related interviews
originally posted on Mourning Goats, a website founded by the
mysterious Mr Goat. Over a year of mostly anonymous work, the Goat
managed to interview some of the most exciting English-language
authors around. Edited by Phil Jourdan and the Goat himself, and
featuring expanded interviews not available online, Chewing the
Page offers a series of weird and hilarious glimpses at the world
of writing. Includes interviews with Stephen Graham Jones, Craig
Clevenger, Paul Tremblay, Donald Ray Pollock, Stephen Elliott, Chad
Kultgen, Chelsea Cain, Rick Moody, Christopher Moore and Nick
Hornby, and others.
A young man seeking to hack into his own unconscious mind. An
academic conference on the metaphysics of flies. An apocalyptic
world where punctuation has been outlawed. An eating disorder that
produces collectible antiques. A mix of allegory, satire, randomly
generated numbers, spam messages rearranged into haiku form,
plagiarism, and bad writing presented in the more sophisticated if
still unpalatable guise of literary experimentation, Phil Jourdan's
collection of stories is infuriating, challenging and other
marketing buzzwords.
John Gardner's career was permanently changed by his publication of
On Moral Fiction (1978), a controversial and derided assessment of
the state of literature as Gardner saw it. By arguing for a return
to greater seriousness and moral commitments in literature, Gardner
found himself attacked on all sides by critics and writers who
found his conservatism suspicious or simply irrelevant. In this
short tribute to Gardner's late intellectual concerns, Phil Jourdan
looks at some of the difficulties in On Moral Fiction, and asks
whether Gardner was rigorous enough in his deployment of various
philosophical concepts through his book. Convinced that, despite
any problems of argumentative method or intellectual honesty, On
Moral Fiction's basic message should not be dismissed outright,
Jourdan tries to determine what is superfluous to the book, so that
we may focus on its core: a call for writers not to forget their
moral influence on readers. Now that Gardner's career is
half-forgotten, it is worth remembering this impassioned and public
debate on the role of literature has been around far longer than we
care to pretend: throughout the centuries, as literature attempts
to define itself over and over, the question of morality is always
lurking in the background. In John Gardner: A Tiny Eulogy, Phil
Jourdan tries to separate the man from the argument, and insists
that the latter should not be dismissed because of the imperfection
of the former.
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