Good stuff in print, from contributors to Offcourse:
Alan Kaufman, whose story "Something's coming to meet you" appeared in Offcourse, Issue #4, Summer 1999, has just published Jew Boy with Fromm International, ISBN 0-88064-252-1
The book is available in bookstores, or contact Sharon Heede,Publicist, 212-308-4010 Ext 3.Some reviews:
In a recent cover story in the San Francisco Chronicle Book Review, staff critic James Sulliven called Alan Kaufman an American-Jewish version of Hubert Selby Jr. and Jean Genet and went on to say: "At its heart -and a great big heart it is- JEW BOY is a classic, if wholly unconventional, American coming-of-age story...Kaufman's writing can make gorgeous dreams of some of his most disturbing memories...JEW BOY combines the core elements of Kerouac's wide-eyed discovery of an alternative America, Henry Miller's resolve to throw open the doors of private lives, however unflattering and Spiegelman's comic-book approach to the modern era's most horrific event, the Holocaust.""A grand epic of a memoir...The concrete details of his passage are perfectly rendered, from the dark dense womb of his parents' apartment in the Bronx to his attempted escape to the open skies of On-the-Road America."Alan Kaufman edits the anthologies The New Generation: Fiction for OurTime from America's Writing Programs and The Outlaw Bible of AmericanPoetry. He is the author of the poetry collection Who Are We? , and has performed widely as a spoken-word poet. His writings have appeared in Salon, Tikkun, The San Francisco Examiner, Witness, and other publications. A former editor of Jewish Frontier, he is the founder and editor of the controversial magazine Davka : Jewish Cultural Revolution and the web zine Tattoo Jew (www.tattoojew.com). He lives in San Francisco.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, author of East into Upper East"Make no mistake: a star is born. A unique original voice with extraordinary stylistic grace and power brings to life the characters (including himself) on every page". of the controversial magazine Harold Norse, author of Memoirs of a Bastard Angel
"Important and amazing", Barbara Probst Salomon
"A major work of literature", Howard Fast
David Siff wrote "No more father no more" for Offcourse, Issue #2. His new book, Eleanor's Rebellion, published by Knopf, is a memoir about the recovery of a lost life -- or rather, two lost lives.
At the age of 40, shortly after the death of the man he thought was his father, Siff discovered, by chance, that he was the illegitimate son of the movie actor Van Heflin.
Everything he had known about his life, his family, was other than what he thought. The secret that had been kept from him was his mother's as much as his own.
Siff's mother died a year after his discovery. His knowledge of her was limited. What he found, in the underworld of his own life, which had become dissolute and chaotic, was a beloved soul rather than a betrayer, someone whose deepest secret was the light of her own life.
Twenty years later, long after his mother's death, Siff's narrative is an attempt to recover her life and his own.
David Siff has written several books under the name David Faulkner. He has been a theatre and television actor and a professor of English literature. He lives in Manhattan.
The second volume of the anthology of Exquisite Corpse is out. Great reading, including contributions by Alan Kaufman and Ricardo Nirenberg.
Thus Spake the Corpse, An Exquisite Corpse Reader 1988-1998, Volume 2 -
Fictions, Travels & Translations. Edited by Andrei Codrescu and Laura Rosenthal.
Black Sparrow Press, 2000.
ISBN: paperback: 1-57423-141-3; cloth:1-57423-142-1.