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  The centrepiece of Brooke-Rose’s Intercom Quartet, Xorandor and Verbivore explore the shifting language of technologies and their catastrophic potential. In Xorandor we meet Jip and Zab, two precocious teens who chance upon a stone claiming to have fallen from Mars, whose skill for absorbing language from multiple frequencies leads him to Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth with pontentially apocalyptic consequences. Verbivore...

  Verbivoracious Press Syllabus   An inexhaustive list of works, with painful omissions and shameless editor preferences, demonstrating feats of immense skill with language, form, or structure (feats one might label innovative or original), or whose chutzpah pleased the editors greatly, arranged in no particular order and with no significance to the entries rendered in bold type, to give the reader a...

  by M.J. NICHOLLS   Party Headquarters by Georgi Tenev (Open Letter Books)   A peculiar novel featuring a narrator who narrates in an oblique manner events that occurred to him across the course and towards the end of an unpleasant regime (Bulgaria’s transition from communism to democracy), including his sexual relationship with the dictator K-shev’s daughter. Fragmented and perplexing at once, illuminating and...

  Who is Marvin Cohen? Brooklyn-born New Yorker Marvin Cohen published numerous surreal and whimsical fictions in books and magazines from 1967 to 1982. This anthology showcases the two modes of Cohen’s writing: short ‘dialogues’ operating in the manner of an Ionesco or Beckett script by inverting language with an eschatological hopelessness while revelling, rather than despairing, in life’s absurdity,...

  First published in 1970, this collection of eleven stories showcases Brooke-Rose’s innovative credentials at their zenith. ‘The Foot’ and the ‘The Religious Button’ deploy to stunning effect her unique evolution of the run-on first person camera-eye narrative style as pioneered by Robbe-Grillet in the nouveau roman movement; ‘Small Loser and Medium Winner’ is a multilingual mix of allusions and...

  Rikki Ducornet is a magical surrealist, postmodern fabulist, multi-talented artist and poet, and author of several novels ripe with epicurean vocabulary, vivid and outrageous imagery, fantastically arcane trivia and erudition, and Rabelaisian re-imaginings of history, among them the Carteresque hellfire of The Stain, the Lewis Carroll homage and wonder-of-wonders The Jade Cabinet, and the beautiful, slowly unfurling heart-attack, Netsuke....

The fifth issue fêtes 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, Eckhard Gerdes, Doug...

  The flagship issue fêtes Christine Brooke-Rose, one of the most innovative voices of the twentieth century, whose fiction plays challenging games with form and structure, using grammatical constraints, multiple languages, and a dicing of genre styles and theoretical discourses as an integral component of her novels.  This 320-page issue contains creative and critical responses to her fiction, theory, and...

Compiling the third VP festschrift was an agonising process of cruel discrimination and random elimination. At nights, in our beds, texts called out to us to be included in the final 100 . . . from across the room, Natalie Sarraute’s Tropisms sang its praises in a soft whimper, Carlos Fuentes’s Christopher Unborn stomped and howled in envious rage,...