Larry McCaffery

The term "cyberpunk" entered the literary landscape in 1984 to describe William Gibson's pathbreaking novel Neuromancer. Cyberpunks are now among the shock troops of postmodernism, Larry McCaffery argues in Storming the Reality Studio, marshalling the resources of a fragmentary culture to create a startling new form. Artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, multinational machinations, frenetic bursts of prose, collisions of style, celebrations of texture: although emerging largely from science fiction, these features of cyberpunk writing are, as this volume makes clear, integrally related to the aims and innovations of the literary avant-garde. By bringing together original fiction by well-known contemporary writers (William Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Kathy Acker, J. G. Ballard, Samuel R. Delany), critical commentary by some of the major theorists of postmodern art and culture (Jacques Derrida, Fredric Jameson, Timothy Leary, Jean-François Lyotard), and work by major practitioners of cyberpunk (William Gibson, Rudy Rucker, John Shirley, Pat Cadigan, Bruce Sterling), Storming the Reality Studio reveals a fascinating ongoing dialog in contemporary culture. What emerges most strikingly from the colloquy is a shared preoccupation with the force of technology in shaping modern life. It is precisely this concern, according to McCaffery, that has put science fiction, typically the province of technological art, at the forefront of creative explorations of our unique age. A rich opporunity for reading across genres, this anthology offers a new perspective on the evolution of postmodern culture and ultimately shows how deeply technological developments have influenced our vision and our art. Selected Fiction contributors: Kathy Acker, J. G. Ballard, William S. Burroughs, Pat Cadigan, Samuel R. Delany, Don DeLillo, William Gibson, Harold Jaffe, Richard Kadrey, Marc Laidlaw, Mark Leyner, Joseph McElroy, Misha, Ted Mooney, Thomas Pynchon, Rudy Rucker, Lucius Shepard, Lewis Shiner, John Shirley, Bruce Sterling, William Vollman Selected Non-Fiction contributors: Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Joan Gordon, Veronica Hollinger, Fredric Jameson, Arthur Kroker and David Cook, Timothy Leary, Jean-François Lyotard, Larry McCaffery, Brian McHale, Dave Porush, Bruce Sterling, Darko Suvin, Takayuki Tatsumi

A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction

Storming the Reality Studio

One of the foremost champions of postmodern and cyberpunk fiction has compiled an anthology that showcases a new subsersive aesthetic sensibility called "avant-pop". Each of these 32 stories draws on media-produced images, slogans, characters, and narrative archetypes from popular culture to convey the radical turn toward over-stimulation and hyper-consumption in American life.

The Avant-pop Anthology

After Yesterday's Crash

Modern science fiction writers, including Gregory Benford, William S. Burroughs, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Bruce Sterling talk about their careers, influences, and works

Interviews with Contemporary American Science Fiction Writers

Across the Wounded Galaxies

Avant-Pop is innovative fiction, comic book art, unique graphics, and various unclassifiable texts written by the most radical, subversive literary talents of the postmodern new wave. They include cult figures in the pop underground (Samuel R. Delany, Kathy Acker, Tim Ferret, Derek Pell, Harold Jaffe), important new writers who have gained prominence since the late eighties (Mark Leyner, Eurudice, William T. Vollmann), and the most promising new kids on the block ("rap fiction" master Ricardo Cortez Cruz--winner of the 1992 Nilon Award for Excellence in Minority Fiction--and Doug Rice, whose obscenely obsessive, Faulkner-meets-Acker prose is showcased here for the first time). Avant-Pop will send a collective wake-up call to all those readers who have spent the last decade nodding off, along with the rest of America's daydream nation. Avant-Pop will actually reverse the numbing effects of years of exposure to the harmful emissions of television, movies, glossy magazines, and commercial bestsellers. Readers who decry the absence of a liberating radicalized art and have had it with our bland B-movie society of the spectacle will hop with the hip in Avant-Pop.

Fiction for a Daydream Nation

Avant-pop

Sinda Gregory

Interviews with American Authors of the 1980s

Alive and Writing

McCaffery interprets the works of three major writers of radically experimental fiction: Robert Coover; Donald Barthelme; and Willam H. Gass. The term “metafiction” here refers to a strain in American writing where the self-concious approach to the art of fiction-making is a commentary on the nature of meaning itself.

The Works of Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, and William H. Cass

The Metafictional Muse

McCaffery converses with the young, recklessly daring, and furiously productive William Vollmann and with Marianne Hauser, who published her first novel nearly sixty years ago ... with Native American trickster novelist Gerald Vizenor and "guerrilla writer" Harold Jaffe (whose literary technique is to "plant a bomb, sneak away") ... with stark minimalist Lydia Davis and text-and-collage artist Derek Pell ... with muscular pop icon Mark Leyner and proto-punk diva Kathy Acker. They are a diverse lot, shaped by very different literary and personal influences, and addressing divergent readerships.

Interviews with Innovative American Authors

Some Other Frequency

Raymond Carver

Ewing Campbell

"Perhaps the most significant and influential figure in this century's wave of American realism, Raymond Carver (1938-1988) is credited not only with reviving the short story as an artistically legitimate form, but also with perfecting minimalist fiction. His 1981 collection, What We Talk about When We Talk about Love, remains the standard against which minimalist literature is measured, and his numerous prize-winning and frequently anthologized stories have established him as the extender of a modernist tradition stretching from Chekhov through Joyce and Hemingway. In his later collections, such as Cathedral (1983) and Where I'm Calling From (1988), Carver surpasses even his own great achievement, setting a bold new path for his short fiction and intensifying the scholarly attention he'd first inspired with "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?" (anthologized in Best American Short Stories of 1967)." "Moving chronologically through Carver's complete short fiction canon and examining key stories in depth, Ewing Campbell traces the author's development through and beyond literary minimalism, into the tradition of tragic allegory. He explores Carvers persistent use of myth and archetype; motifs of the grotesque; religious iconography; and oppressed, spiritually paralyzed characters. From the earliest stories through the latest, Campbell illuminates Carvers constant fascination with the way individuals connect or fail to connect with one another."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Larry McCaffery

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