Endless Short Story

I, Bitchakokoff, Kewpie Slitz, Dong Wang, Crown Prince von Moccasin and Aziff defy common sense in a series of topographical adventures that skate across the page as if there were no yesterday. These interconnected stories project a sense of life as ongoing improvisation in which you never know what’s going to happen next, in which you are always in the middle of the story and in which events do not begin and end but only start and stop. Making use of the urban folklore of childhood, the resources of typography and the eccentricities of experience, they have the continuity of a doodle, a comic strip or a painting by Paul Klee. Written in a style that pits the reality of the page against the fictionality of life, these stories address the strangeness, comedy, and unpredictability of common experience, moving from hyper-realism to a child-like playfulness and covering a wide range of moods and levels of organization. The Endless Short Story continues Ronald Sukenick’s dialogue with “the intelligence,” in which he has said, “you practice a discipline of abstraction I practice a discipline of inclusion. You practice a discipline of reduction I of addition. You pursue essentials I ride with the random. You cultivate separation toward stillness I rest in movement.”