Negativeland

Fiction. Experimental Writing. This rueful tale follows an Olympic gold medal winner and his girlfriend on a cross-country trip to revisit his brief moment of triumph and his subsequent long haul on the promotions circuit. Composed in the tradition of constraint writing, Nufer's smart, flirtatious tour-de-force combines comic gusto and technical virtuosity, while providing penetrating thoughts on our country's obsession with private foibles and public image. Rebecca Brown lauds this "brainy, babbly, wry" work as "more fun than a crossword puzzle at a linguists' convention", while Michael Upchurch deems NEGATIVELAND "an intricate, multi-layered masterpiece by a writer who's a true original".

This anthology of Fly's zines from 1992-1996 contains equal amounts of surreal comix and twisted prose, describing her daily struggle to keep things going against powerful controlling forces and have some fun, too. Fighting with contemptuous cops, fixing up abandoned buildings, hanging around making observations about street life and love are some of the themes that construct this book, a celebration of the nonalienated life and its schizzy absurdities.

In this rueful tale, written under a simple but pervasive formal constraint, Olympic gold medal winner Ken Honochick and his girlfriend take a cross-country road trip to revisit his brief moment of triumph and his subsequent long haul on the promotions circuit. The result is a smart, flirtatious tour-de-force thats as funny as it is inventive. Under all the comic gusto and technical virtuosity, however, theres also some penetrating thought on our countrys obsession with private foibles and public image, individual achievement and the pressure to cash in on it.