Conjunctions #22: The Novellas Issue

Conjunctions #22

by Bradford Morrow (Editor)

This collection was put together on the premise that the world can never have too many fairy tales, too many fables, too many yarns. When selecting materials, I (Bradford Morrow) did tend to favor narratives that touched upon the impossible. If there is anything that binds all these pieces together it is an embrace of enchantment, and an abiding interest in transformation, be it fantastical, fabular or miraculous.

320 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1994

About the author

Bradford Morrow has lived for the past thirty years in New York City and rural upstate New York, though he grew up in Colorado and lived and worked in a variety of places in between. While in his mid-teens, he traveled through rural Honduras as a member of the Amigos de las Americas program, serving as a medical volunteer in the summer of 1967. The following year he was awarded an American Field Service scholarship to finish his last year of high school as a foreign exchange student at a Liceo Scientifico in Cuneo, Italy. In 1973, he took time off from studying at the University of Colorado to live in Paris for a year. After doing graduate work on a Danforth Fellowship at Yale University, he moved to Santa Barbara, California, to work as a rare book dealer. In 1981 he relocated to New York City to the literary journal Conjunctions, which he founded with the poet Kenneth Rexroth, and to write novels. He and his two cats divide their time between NYC and upstate New York.

Visit his website at www.bradfordmorrow.com.

Reviews

[Declan · Rating 3 out of 5]

The issue of Conjunctions was published in 1994 and much (perhaps all?) of it has since appeared in books by the various authors. A revelation for me was the novella by Allan Gurganus which in a slanted, tangential manner evokes the character and ethos of a dead man whose passion was restoring grand old houses. There are also excellent contributions from John Barth (now part of On with the Story); Ben Marcus (from the highly imaginative The Age of Wire and String); Harry Matthews (published as part of The Journalist and, overall, more effective within that mischievous novel): a delicate Proustian tale from John Hawkes (from The Frog) and some of Arno Schmidt's peculiar, elliptical prose (now included in Collected Novellas: Collected Early Fiction 1949-1964).

After that there is boredom from Lynne Tillman and much obfuscation courtesy of Robert Antoni, Kevin Magee and numerous poets, all of whom reinforce the view that I have long held that there is no tedium to compare with the logorrhea licenced by the worst excesses of the avant-garde.