Beyond the Techno-Cave

Spending a lot of time proofreading, typesetting, guerrilla marketing, and fighting versus Barnes & Noble for fair practices toward small presses, etc., it seems that it's very rare that I actually get to savor the entrance of one of our books into the world. But that is what I am doing today with appearance of Harold Jaffe's Beyond the Techno-Cave: A Guerrilla Writer's Guide to Post-Millennial Culture.

Jaffe is one of the best prose writers I know of in the US today. He's perfected a style of immediate, single-sentence-paragraph composition that I find myself imitating quite a bit in my own work. His writing is socially engaged, a rarity among today's fiction writers, who more commonly handle political situations in apolitical ways, as if truth were somehow always in the middle of every debate. Harold Jaffe doesn't think so. His writing is horrified that we have rampant homelessness in our wealthy nation, that our tax dollars fund secret prisons in violation of the Geneva Conventions, and especially that many writers accommodate these and other injustices so as to find sinecures where they can practice their safe arts safely.

But Jaffe is more than just a writer of political screeds, as I started to mention above. His prose is one of the most innovative and interesting around today. The single-sentence paragraphs he customarily employs create movement in his short "docufictions" (mixtures of fact, fiction, and philosophical and political specualations that have become his dominant form) are terrifically agile, able to spring in any direction at once. Jaffe is the author of over a dozen books, and before I was his publisher I was his reader, and a fan. He also plays games with voices, playing off knowing versus innocent, world-weary versus unaware, and storyteller-interlocutor oppositions to advance his narratives. His leaps are frequently startling, often provocative, and NEVER boring.

Beyond the Techno-Cave is heavier on the docu- oftentime than the -fiction. This is intentional: his main goal here is to collect observations on contemporary art, writing, politics, and social trends. But these essay-fictions, or whatever one wishes to call them, are formally innovative as well, as one would expect from a writer who is also the editor of Fiction International, which is one of the longest-lived and consistently innovative fiction journals around, which recently published its 39th issue in its 33rd year of existence.

Beyond the Techno-Cave will be available in 2007, but pre-publication copies are now available on the Starcherone Books site. If you don't know his work, you owe it to yourself to check it out.