Patrik Ouredník – författare

A wide-ranging anthology of experimental writing—prose, poetry, and hybrid—from its most significant practitioners and innovators  A variety of names have been used to describe fiction, poetry, and hybrid writing that explore new forms and challenges mainstream traditions. Those phrases include experimental, conceptual, avant-garde, hybrid, surfiction, fusion, radical, slip-stream, avant-pop, postmodern, self-conscious, innovative, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing, alternative, and anti- or new literature. Conceptualisms: The Anthology of Prose, Poetry, Visual, Found, E- & Hybrid Writing as Contemporary Art is the first major anthology of writing that offers readers an overview of this other tradition as it lives in the early decades of the 21st century.Featuring over 100 pieces from more than 90 authors, this anthology offers a plethora of aesthetics and approaches to a wide variety subjects. Editor Steve Tomasula has gathered poems, prose, and hybrid pieces that all challenge our understanding of what literature means. Intended as a collection of the most exciting and bold literary work being made today, Tomasula has put a spotlight on the many possibilities available to writers and readers wishing for a glimpse of literature’s future.Readers will recognize authors who have shaped contemporary writing, as among them Lydia Davis, Charles Bernstein, Jonathan Safran Foer, Shelley Jackson, Nathaniel Mackey, David Foster Wallace, and Claudia Rankine. Even seasoned readers will find authors, and responses to the canon, not yet encountered. Conceptualisms is a book of ideas for writers, teachers and scholars, as well as readers who wonder how many ways literature can live.The text features headnotes to chapters on themes such as sound writing, electronic literature, found text, and other forms, offering accessible introductions for readers new to this work. An online companion presents statements about the work and biographies of the authors in addition to audio, video, and electronic writing that can’t be presented in print. Visit www.conceptualisms.info to read more.

Centered on an elderly retiree and his intellectual adversary, the shrewd Inspector Lebeda, "Case Closed" is filled with all the expected elements of a thriller--murder, rape, suicide!--but soon reveals itself as a wily and sophisticated parable about the dangers of language itself, in which the author takes aim at human nature with a devastating arsenal of genre-mixing, wordplay, and whimsical, biting satire.

A Voltairean attack on the political idealism that gave birth to the modern world.

Tracing the Great War through the Millennium Bug, 1999 through 1900, Dadaism throughScientology through Sierra Leonean bicycle riding and back, award-winning Czech author PatrikOurednik explores the horror and absurdity of the twentieth century in an explosivedeconstruction of historical memory.Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century opens on the beaches of Normandy in1944, comparing the heights of different forces’ soldiers and considering how tall, long, or goodat fertilizing fields the men’s bodies will be. Probing the depths of humanity and inhumanity,this is an account of history as it has never been told: “engaging, even frightening.” At oncerecreating and uncreating the twentieth century, Ourednik explores the connections across thedecades between the disparate figures, events, and politics we thought we knew.Patrik Ourednik’s Europeana merits the author’s reputation as a giant of post-1989 Czechliterature. Now translated into 33 languages, the book is a masterwork of cubism, apolymorphic monologue of statistics and movements and fine print and discoveries that evokesthe deadpan absurdity of Kafka and the gallows humor of Hašek. Ourednik has created amesmerizing, maddening account of the past, and his interrogation of “truth” and objectivityresonates now more than ever.