Projections

by Eckhard Gerdes

I hardly know how to describe my astonishment at coming across this beautifully designed little book & reading the opening pages. It was like recognizing a face I'd never seen before. This book is a most ambitious, strange, funny foray into giving life to the floating undercurrents that we all feel as we go thru our daily lives. Gerdes accomplishes this with techniques ranging from a sort of holy science fiction to a condition of prose that I can only call beautiful madness. Yet he isn't just playing--he's trying to remind you of how you yourself feel when you conscious mind is just barely on the verge of noticing that, let's say, the whole time you've been listening to your wife's voice, you've been equating it on some other level to a world of rivers, music, light-projections & memories of things that did & did not happen to you. This book should be considered a travelling permit in realms that are just at your fingertips. Besides, it's damned funny!

168 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1986

About the author

Eckhard Gerdes is an American-born novelist & editor. He earned his MFA in creative writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

He's author of fifteen published books of fiction:
Projections ['86 Depth Charge] a novella
Ring in a River ['92 Depth Charge] a novel
Truly Fine Citizen ['89 Highlander] a novel
Cistern Tawdry ['02 Fugue State] a novel
Przewalski's Horse ['06 Red Hen] a novel
The Million-Year Centipede, or, Liquid Structures ['07 Raw Dog Screaming] a novel
Nin & Nan ['08 Bizarro] a novella
My Landlady the Lobotomist ['08 Raw Dog Screaming] a novel
The Unwelcome Guest and Nin and Nan ['10 Enigmatic Ink] two novellas
Hugh Moore ['10 Civil Coping Mechanisms, '15 Heroinum] a novel
Three Psychedelic Novellas ['12 Enigmatic Ink] three novellas
The Sylvia Plath Cookbook: A Satire ['12 Sugar Glider] a long short story
White Bungalows ['15 Dirt Heart Pharmacy ] a novel
Marco & Iarlaith ['18 Black Scat] a novel in flash fiction
The Pissers'Theatre ['21 Black Scat] a novel

two volumes of poetry:
23 Skidoo! 23 Form-Fitting Poems ['13 Finishing Line]
Blues for Youse ['15 ATTOHO]

a play:
'S A Bird ['13 Black Scat]

a work of creative nonfiction
How to Read ['14 Guide Dog]

His work reflects experimental technique, sometimes ignoring time, space, or causality in the service of stories of individuals struggling to transcend fear & limitation. His recent work has been associated with the Bizarro Fiction movement, of which he is one of the leading proponents.

Reviews of his work have appeared in Rain Taxi, Notre Dame Review, Dream People, Review of Contemporary Fiction & elsewhere.

Eckhard Gerdes is the editor of The Journal of Experimental Fiction, issues of which are usually Festschrifts on a single writer (e.g. John Barth, Raymond Federman, Harold Jaffe). He has also written on modern & post-modern literature for Review of Contemporary Fiction, Hyde Park Review of Books & other magazines.

Gerdes has been awarded an &NOW Award for Innovative Fiction and has twice been the recipient of the Richard Pike Bissell Creative Writing Award for excerpts from Przewalski's Horse. The Million-Year Centipede was selected as one of the top ten mainstream novels of 2007 in the annual Preditors & Editors Readers Poll. He has also been a finalist for both the Starcherone & the Blatt fiction prizes for his unpublished manuscript White Bungalows. For Cistern Tawdry Gerdes was nominated for the Georgia Author of the Year Award in the Fiction Category. He lives near Chicago. He has three children and five grandchildren.

Reviews

[Philip Athans · Rating 5 out of 5]

This remarkable book--really a "chapbook" if that's even still a thing--has been sitting on my shelf for thirty-five years, unread. On a whim I picked it out and was immediately drawn into a strange and disjointed world that left me feeling, inexplicably, as though I was reading a story of desperation.