Raymond Federman

Double or Nothing challenges the way we read fiction and the way we see words, and in the process, gives us back more of our own world and our real dilemmas than we are used to getting.

Double Or Nothing

The fifth issue fEtes tireless innovator in fiction and poetry, renowned Beckett scholar, relentless self-mythologiser, impish postmodern theorist, riotous humorist, playful pedagogue, friend and father Raymond Federman, with contributions from Jerome Klinkowitz, Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Jacob Paul, Douglas Messerli, Larry McCaffery, Julia Frey, Geoffrey Gatza, Ted Pelton, Simone Federman, Steve Katz, Serpil Opperman, G.N. Forester, Eckhart Gerdes, Doug Rice, plus exclusive fictions from the Federman archives, including several from an abandoned volume of abandoned fictions. "Only a century as excruciating as the twentieth could have produced a voice like Raymond Federman's - a voice in a closet, hailing us all with scurrilous laughter and absurd wisdom. This volume in celebration of Hombre de la Pluma samples that voice, and echoes with the voices of some of those who resonated to it. It's all a pack of lies and, of course, all perfectly true." -- Brian McHale, author of Postmodernist Fiction "A feast for Fed-heads and a great introduction for newcomers, this lavish volume is an appropriately irreverent, loving, and off-the-wall celebration of one of the most important writers of post-war American fiction. Yeah, really. Time to reappraise, critics. And for the rest of you guys, time to dive back in. Federman lives " -- Scott Black, author of Of Essays and Reading in Early Modern Britain

Verbivoracious Festschrift Volume 5

Take it or leave it

In this, his fifth novel in English (and its first paperback edition), the acclaimed French-born writer and poet, Raymond Federman, has given us the bittersweet tale of Moinous and Sucette who fall in love "across a smile" in Washington Square. Smiles on Washington Square is a charming and complex novel. With the masterful ease of a tightrope walker, Federman plays with our sense of time and space as he creates, with extraordinary compassion, a tale that makes us see our own vulnerability and worthiness. Stylistically, his links to Beckett are evident in the stripped down prose, the remarkable symbolism and word games, and in his focus on the downtrodden and inarticulate cast-aways of an industrialized world. Ultimately, Smiles on Washington Square is a book that teaches us there is no easy story, no safe entrance, no line of action not fraught with obstacles and humiliation; but finally, in the face of the inevitable disappointment of the human condition, Federman shows us how sweet possibility is.

A Love Story of Sorts

Smiles on Washington Square

This book examines how, beginning in the 1960s up to the present, a new type of fiction was created in America, but also in Europe and Latin America, in response to the cultural, social, and political turmoil of the time. The author has coined the term "Surfiction" for this New Fiction. Written in an informal, provocative style, by an internationally known practitioner, these essays examine the cultural, social, and political conditions that forced serious writers to reflect (often within the work itself) on the act of writing fiction in the modern world. The entire book can be read as a manifesto for the present and future of the new fiction. This book is the first in the SUNY series in Postmodern Culture, edited by Joseph Natoli.

Postmodern Essays

Critifiction

récit exagéré à lire à haute voix assis, debout, ou couché

Amer Eldorado, 2/001

Fiction. In occupied France, an adolescent boy, pushed into a closet as his family is taken by Nazi soldiers, accidentally escapes the death camps. As an adult, "Federman," at once the novelist himself and a literary character, wonders what it means to re-tell this experience, if it can be re-told, or if the reduction of one's story or life to a single moment isn't the greatest of all horrors. Since its initial publication in 1979, THE VOICE IN THE CLOSEThas been hailed as one of the great experiments of prose ficiton: a single sentence, concrete recit of wrenching emotional impact. The new bilingual edition of the text features French and English versions newly revised by the author, with an introduction by Gerard Bucher and an end note by Theodore Pelton.

The Voice in the Closet

In 1963, renowned Franco-American author Raymond Federman - then a young academic, just fresh from defending his PhD - met Samuel Beckett in Paris. The meeting was to change his life. 'Sam' became both a great friend and a great source of inspiration to Federman throughout his writing career. Intensely moving and intensely funny by turns, this unique book is both a memoir of a friendship, and a typically Federman-esque tribute to Beckett and his work. The Sam Book brings together memories, anecdotes, extracts from articles and talks, and other pieces of writing that derive their inspiration directly from Beckett's work.

The Sam Book

In 1942, after hiding to escape the Nazis, our narrator (named, simply, Federman) finds his way to Vichy France. Unwanted by his relatives, he is forced to spend the remainder of the war as an unpaid laborer. For three wordless years on the farm, this thirteen-year-old is assailed by suffering, death, sex, and the back-breaking labor of shoveling manure. Sixty years later, in the United States, Federman—the author? the narrator? both?—wrestles with nostalgia and bitterness. He finally returns to the farm with his wife, but once the journey is complete he no longer knows why he has made it, nor what he expected to find. Through the merger of fact and fiction, storytelling and reality, memoir and imagination, Return to Manure extends and enhances Raymond Federman’s brilliant ability to side-step narration’s limits and impossibilities. From reviews of the French edition: “Federman pursues his work of memory and imagination with a gravity always kept at a distance, and a touch of nostalgia constantly undercut by a saving humor.”—Le Monde “In this kind of road movie that oscillates between derision, humor, grinding of teeth, stuttering of memory, pure and simple inventions, and even lies, the old story-teller Federman is not afraid to drivel on. A prodigious masterpiece.”—L’Humanit “In the tragicomic mode, one cannot do better.”—Tlrana Raymond Federman was born in France and came to the United States soon after World War II. He has published fifteen novels, eight volumes of poetry, and numerous articles, essays, plays, and stories. His novels have been translated into fourteen languages, and have won the American Book Award, the Frances Steloff Fiction Prize, and the Panache Experimental Fiction Prize. He has been awarded a Guggenheim, NEA, and Fulbright Fellowships. Federman retired in 1999 as Melodia E. Jones Chair of Literature at SUNY-Buffalo and now lives in San Diego.

Return to Manure

Roman

Betrifft: Sarahs Cousin

John Fletcher

An Essay in Bibliography

Samuel Beckett: His Works and His Critics

An Exaggerated Second-hand Tale to be Read Aloud Either Standing Or Sitting

Take it Or Leave it

The 1994 Federman Lectures in Turkey

Raymond Federman, the Supreme Indecision of the Writer

This book consists of a set of letters from an unidentified writer to an unidentified recipient. The novel ends mysteriously, and so continues to vibrate in our imagination. To Whom it May Concern will join that short list of books we treasure most deeply, those few statements that remind us of who we are, and of what we are capable.

A Novel

To Whom it May Concern

This book examines how, beginning in the 1960s up to the present, a new type of fiction was created in America, but also in Europe and Latin America, in response to the cultural, social, and political turmoil of the time. The author has coined the term Surfiction for this New Fiction. Written in an informal, provocative style, by an internationally known practitioner, these essays examine the cultural, social, and political conditions that forced serious writers to reflect (often within the work itself) on the act of writing fiction in the modern world. The entire book can be read as a manifesto for the present and future of the new fiction. This book is the first in the SUNY series in Postmodern Culture, edited by Joseph Natoli.

Fiction Now and Tomorrow

Surfiction

Fiction. Jewish Studies. "Shhh, murmured my mother. And the first thirteen years of my life vanished into the darkness of that third floor closet." On a July morning in 1942, Raymond Federman's childhood ended, as his parents and two sisters were arrested by collaborationist French police and sent to their deaths at Auschwitz, with Raymond alone evading capture. In SHHH, his final novel, Federman reconstructs this childhood out of fragments, speculations, and doubtful recollections--the stories of a lost life, enmeshed with a history that can never be forgotten. "Federman is inarguably one of the most significant vanguard writers of the second half of the twentieth century and first years of the twenty-first"--Lance Olsen.

The Story of a Childhood

Shhh

A reprinting of the important novel by Raymond Federman.

The Twofold Vibration

Drama. This book contains a long drama, The Precipice, and two shorter plays--Act without Words for the Hand and Who Will Crack First. Renowned experimentalist Raymond Federman was born in France in 1928 and emigrated to the U.S. in 1947. He has published eight novels, four volumes of poetry, four books of criticism, and numerous articles, essays, poems, plays, and stories. His novels have been translated into more than a dozen languages. SPD carries a number of books by Raymond Federman including AUNT RACHEL'S FUR, THE VOICE IN THE CLOSET and MY BODY IN NINE PARTS.

Raymond Federman

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