Synopses & Reviews
"Joyce is part of a revolution in narrative form."Newsweek
"Dawn it is, to be sure. The granddaddy of full-length hypertext fiction is Michael Joyce's landmark Afternoon"Robert Coover, The New York Times Book Review
Michel Foucault famously wrote, "I am fully aware that I have never written anything other than fictions." In this polylingual, operatic fantasy comprised of invented letters, most of them unsent, set in Sweden during February 1956 while Foucault was undergoing a Swedish winter, the philosopher finds himself not just researching, but living through, his work to come, Madness and Civilization.
Synopsis
A great thinker's estrangement and crisis, months in foreign country, imagined by one of our most internationally celebrated innovative writers.
About the Author
Michael Joyce is the author of eleven books in a career as a writer in several genres - poet, critic, and collaborative multimedia artist. Joyce is best known as the author of afternoon, which The New York Times called "the granddaddy of hypertext fictions," and which The Toronto Globe and Mail said "is to the hypertext interactive novel what the Gutenberg bible is to publishing." Internationally celebrated, a laureate of The City of Paris whose fiction, poetry, and critical works have been praised by Helene Cixous, Umberto Eco, Robert Coover, Atlantic, and Newsweek, among others, Joyce's print books have garnered acclaim independent of his achievements in new media. His debut novel, The War Outside Ireland (1983) won the Great Lakes New Writers Award, and his most recent print novel, Going the Distance, is a finalist for the 2013 CASEY Award for Best Baseball Book of the Year from Spitball: The Literary Baseball Magazine. "Der Homer der Hypertexte," as Joyce was termed in Der TAZ in Berlin, has been translated into Italian, German, Polish, and French. Recent work includes poetry and translations published in Fence, Iowa Review, Spoon River River, Notre Dame Review, and numerous other venues; text-painting-video collaborations with artist Alexandra Grant, including for her one-woman show at Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles; and the libretto for Canzoni di morte, a collaboration with Venezuelan video artist Anita Pantin and Canadian composer Bruce Pennycook - among other collaborations and multimedia work. Michael Joyce lives along the Hudson River just south of Poughkeepsie, where he is Professor of English and Media Studies at Vassar College.