A01=Stephen-Paul Martin
Author_Stephen-Paul Martin
Category=FYB
creative fiction
creative writing
eq_anthologies-novellas-short-stories
eq_bestseller
eq_fiction
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
Experimental fiction
experimental storytelling
FC2
fiction collective 2
novel
Product details
- ISBN 9781573661348
- Weight: 260g
- Dimensions: 165 x 215mm
- Publication Date: 11 Mar 2007
- Publisher: The University of Alabama Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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The Possibility of Music is an imaginative reconstruction of America in the early 21st century. What would our post-9/11 society look like if it were viewed through a series of funhouse mirrors? Each of Stephen-Paul Martin's stories is a response to this question, a prose exploration that redefines what it means to write fiction in a world in which the Sistine Chapel has become the Mall of America. Nightmarish at times, playfully amusing at others, Martin's prose is relentlessly inventive and challenging, relocating the experimental tradition of Joyce, Kafka, Borges, and Marquez in a contemporary context in which intelligent communication has become both impossible and increasingly necessary. ""I'd always told myself that if I ever wrote my own music,"" the narrator of one story says, ""every composition would become its own distinct struggle with aesthetic questions that emerged as the process unfolded."" In good part, that's what animates ""The Possibility of Music"", a book in which John Coltrane's ""A Love Supreme"" moves through characters and stories like a soundtrack.
Stephen-Paul Martin is a widely published author of poetry (Things, Invading Reagan, Until it Changes), fiction (Instead of Confusion, The Gothic Twilight), and nonfiction. Currently Professor of English at San Diego State University, from 1980-1996 he edited Central Park magazine and taught at New York University.
