Color Plates

by Adam Golaski

Fiction. COLOR PLATES is a museum of stories, curated by a sort-of Mary Cassatt. Four rooms of Mary's museum are open to the public, and they are named Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Mary Cassatt. COLOR PLATES contains sixty-three little stories—plates—spun from real paintings by these painters. The stories range from sweet to weird, from melancholy to funny. This isn't just a short story collection, and it isn't a novel, but something else entirely. The plates each stand alone, offering startling visions and situations. Yet at the same time, COLOR PLATES offers the depth of a novel, with recurring characters, themes, and motifs. The museum My name is Mary and Mary is my museum. Paintings are brushstroke upon brushstroke. With a pencil I lift each brushstroke and make lines. Line upon line, story upon story, the small fictions in COLOR PLATES will engage you, delight you, and challenge you to consider the intersections between art and time.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

209 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2010

About the author

Adam Golaski is a husband and a father. Adam wrote Color Plates (Rose Metal Press, 2009). His translation of Sir Gawain & the Green Knight—"Green"—appears in installments on the critical site Open Letters. His poetry, fiction (horror and otherwise), and non-fiction has appeared in journals such as: word for/word, Supernatural Tales, McSweeney's, Sleepingfish, Conjunctions, and All Hallows. He is currently editing selected poetry of Paul Hannigan for Pressed Wafer, and co-edited for Flim Forum Press two anthologies of experimental poetry, Oh One Arrow (2007) and A Sing Economy (2008). Adam edits and publishes New Genre, a journal of horror and science fiction, now in its seventh year. He collaborates musically with Jeremy Withers as Outlet; their most recent single, "Why Worry Rosary," appeared on the multi-media compilation Schwa 10.

Reviews

[Megan Sanks]

A collection of short stories based on paintings that connect in the most subtle and interesting ways. I loved Golaski's writing in this book. His usage of details and adjectives were, simply, enchanting. His words made the paintings come alive.

[West Hartford Public Library]

Golaski's collection--quite elegant in its compact presentation--acts as a museum, offering its reader short tales (often under three pages) based on paintings by Eduoard Manet, Edgar Degas, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Mary Cassatt. Though the stories are mostly unrelated, on occasion characters from one story weave themselves into later entries, and quite often the themes of love and memory find their way into the text. Style ranges from realistic, minimalist fiction to the avant-garde. COLOR PLATES is a strange little trip, but one worth taking.

[Des Lewis]

Any “Color Plates” below in this whole review are my assessed choices as to the Golaski text’s referred images of paintings….for you to decide whether such images to be seen now are spoilers for each vignette-sized plate of prose.
The black and white text, I guess, represents EITHER more examples of this author’s supreme weird literature OR equally supreme inferred colourful prose-music constituents of a ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’-type tour in which my job is to find the gestalt from such leitmotifs. It is probably both these things and more.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of its observations at the time of the review.

[J.A.]

"Rose Metal Press prides itself on the hybrid nature of its titles, and Adam Golaski’s Color Plates is a perfect example of this cross-genre publishing niche. As with all good books, Color Plates has layers, a surface underneath a surface underneath a surface, but there is more at play in Golaski’s book, more refnement than simple addition, more complicated existence than just putting one on top of another – Color Plates sheds skin in each passage, reveals a depth beneath a depth, and unpacks words in a venturous way."

Read the full review at The Rumpus: http://therumpus.net/2011/03/color-pl...

[Lori]

from publisher for review

[Jessi]

Very cool idea for a book but the stories weren't as interesting as I'd hoped.