Richard Kostelanetz Presents One Dozen New Books, March 25, 2013, New York City

Richard Kostelanetz Presents One Dozen New Books
March 25, 2013, New York City

On Monday 25 March, 2013, at 7 pm. at McNally-Robinson, 52 Prince Street, between Lafayette and Mulberry Streets, Richard Kostelanetz will present over one dozen recent books rarely, if ever, seen before, many of them mostly produced with the new technology of “on-demand printing” and thus reasonably priced.

Among them are Epiphanies, two vols., 1000 pages, one story to a book page, culminating thirty years of work with resonant single-sentence fictions.

Conceptual Fictions, a long essay with examples about the framing of implicit narratives.

Visual Fictions, collecting pages designed more than a decade ago for my Openings and Complete Stories, along with his Leonardo and Me.

Verbal Fictions, various narratives that are not visually enhanced.

Vocal Shorts, an expanded edition of his texts designed for live performance.

Openings Short Fictions, the initial sentences of otherwise nonexistent stories.

Reflections on Loving and Relationships, his aphorisms continuously on right-hand pages against drawings of men and women made by the prominent choreographer Frances Alenikoff.

A Universe of Sentences, his continuous selection of lines by others worth remembering, the whole representing a universe of experience.

1001 Stories Enumerated, single-sentence fictions meant to be complete in themselves.

Erotic Minimal Fictions, a variety of alternatives.

Fields/Arenas/Pitches/Turfs, which completes the publication of geometric poems begun thirty years ago.

1-99: A Book, another narrative composed only of numerals.

Ghostories, which are fictions created by boldfacing certain letters within a single word.

Homophones: Stories, where narratives are composed from two or more words that sound alike if spelled differently.

To & Fro &, where narratives depend upon turning the book’s pages.

Ops & Clos, where opening and closings, each set with its own typography, are interspersed.

English, Really English, in which he collects English words that seem incredible—over five thousand of them alphabetically in several perfectbound volumes.

What I Didn’t Do, which epitomizes intellectual nonhistory as Kostelanetz’s record of proposals that were never supported.

A Book of Eyes, photocopied and velobound, which explores the richly various ways that the letter I appears in contemporary typography

His presentation may also include such slightly older books as Skeptical Essays (Autonomedia), his latest collection of mostly severe criticism; Three Poems (NY Quarterly), where his experiments with three strains of one-word poetry appear interspersed; and Micro Fictions, a limited-edition hardback with 900 pages of imaginatively designed narratives all three words and less.

All these books should add to acknowledgments of Kostelanetz’s books in critical histories of literature, poetry, fiction, and book art.

At McNally-Robinson on 25 March, Richard Kostelanetz will answer questions and gladly sign copies of these and other books of his.

Individual entries on Richard Kostelanetz’s work in several fields appear in various editions of Readers Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers, Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature, Contemporary Poets, Contemporary Novelists, Postmodern Fiction, Webster's Dictionary of American Writers, The HarperCollins Reader’s Encyclopedia of American Literature, Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, Directory of American Scholars, Who's Who in America, Who's Who in the World, Who's Who in American Art, NNDB.com, Wikipedia.com, and Britannica.com, among other distinguished directories. Otherwise, he survives in New York, where he was born, unemployed and thus overworked.