Grant Maierhofer – författare

A collection of related stories that deal with the anxiety, pain, and ennui of addiction and withdrawal.  Drain Songs gathers five stories and a novella focused on the many trials of modern life-addiction and depression, mania and disorder, attempts and failure at keeping the worst at bay. Grant Maierhofer's stories focus on characters in varying states of disarray and stuckness, continuing his literary project of analyzing lives on the fringes of sanity and society. The novella 'Drain Songs' is a harrowing narrative focused squarely on addiction and recovery, twelve-step programs, and codependency.  In all of these tales, Maierhofer takes a bee's eye view of protagonists from all walks of life, from the working class to the academy, from janitors to professors, embodying the commonalities of men and women struggling with the very fundamental elements of survival, perspective, and identity-attempts formal and informal to contend with the trials that forever engage and perplex humanity.  His evocative prose conveys both despair and resignation as well as stultifying, brain-deadening routine and repetition. Still, these stories transcend angst and tilt toward agony and ecstasy and the hope of redemption.

Shame is a daring exploration of the potential and limits of autofiction, wherein certain authentic features of the author’s life are written alongside fictitious ones. Here we meet Grant Maierhofer at various points within his life then, now, and in the future as he investigates the sense of shame that haunts the course of his days. The real and unreal, fact and fiction, blur together in a Kaufmanesque sequence of overlapping narratives about of who we really are, how we cope with regret, and the repetitions of our behavior.Through lists, fragments, recollections, and rants, the story of a son’s vexing grief for his father emerges. A sober addict trying to figure out how to navigate pleasure, diversion, and escape. A father trying to figure out marriage, children, maturity, and responsibility. A confused observer in a world constantly torn apart by media, politics, and aggression. A meditation on the nature of art, and art’s place in contemporary life.

A minute-by-minute analysis of Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York (2008).Blending film criticism with creative nonfiction, each book in the Timecodes series focuses on one film, exploring it minute by minute beginning with minute one, and ending with the final minute before the closing credits. In the canon of Charlie Kaufman written/directed films, which include Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Synecdoche, New York is perhaps the purest distillation of his aesthetics as it follows the protagonist, Caden Cotard, a theater director who struggles with his work and women as he creates a life-size replica of New York City inside a warehouse as part of his new play. This book elevates this signature film to a higher place in the pantheon of Kaufman films with a nuanced, compassionate reading of a film that has a reputation for being removed and cold.

A minute-by-minute analysis of Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York (2008).Blending film criticism with creative nonfiction, each book in the Timecodes series focuses on one film, exploring it minute by minute beginning with minute one, and ending with the final minute before the closing credits. In the canon of Charlie Kaufman written/directed films, which include Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Synecdoche, New York is perhaps the purest distillation of his aesthetics as it follows the protagonist, Caden Cotard, a theater director who struggles with his work and women as he creates a life-size replica of New York City inside a warehouse as part of his new play. This book elevates this signature film to a higher place in the pantheon of Kaufman films with a nuanced, compassionate reading of a film that has a reputation for being removed and cold.