Bøger udgivet af Verbivoraciouspress

Alan Burns was an important voice in a group of experimental writers who came to the fore in Great Britain in the post-World War II era. He worked in multiple genres-essays, interviews, drama, non-fiction, and short fiction-however, his reputation is based primarily on his eight novels, the first four of which are collected in this volume. In Buster, Burns recounts the childhood and maturation of Dan Graveson, a middle-class boy who experiences the death of his mother and older brother at a young age and who wanders from one undertaking and profession to another. Europe After the Rain moves into a surrealist aesthetic, one in which non sequiturs, the absence of rational motivation, and surprising juxtapositions predominate. Celebrations is the first of the "cut-up" novels: Burns visited used bookstores, purchased "good junk fiction," searched for clichés and folded the pages or cut trenchant phrases and sentences out and reassembled them on a drafting table. The result, he commented, "was a wonderful fragmentation, a chaos of language in which I can find new connections and images of language". In Babel, this technique is taken to an extreme: the novel has no continuous narrative thread and no chapters; pages are arranged in blocks of text separated by white space, and in some cases the text appears to be arranged in newspaper columns or like a concrete poem, with lines that can be read horizontally or vertically. These four novels showcase the inventive and exciting prose innovations of one of Britain's most daring novelists.INTRODUCTION BY DAVID W. MADDEN. CONTAINS BUSTER, EUROPE AFTER THE RAIN, CELEBRATIONS, BABEL, AND THE STORY 'WONDERLAND'.

Likely to have the distinction of being the first (and perhaps only) novel constructed using the format of parliamentary debates, Verbatim: A Novel is presented as a Hansard document interspersed with office emails (using a multiplicity of fonts) between the new Hansard Director, editors, other Hansard employees, and parliamentary officials, creating a palpable tension which progresses the novel. Rather than mirror the exaggerated and excessive behaviours characterising contemporary parliaments around the world, Bursey subtly satirises, displaying a fine sense of humour and providing a keen dissection of the political machinations of parliamentary procedure and the bureaucratic structure that supports it.This higly innovative and imaginative book commences with a metafictional twist - an essay by a real critic from a convention concerned with the contemporary Canadian novel - before proceeding to the debates proper in chronological order. The cast of parliamentary characters are cleverly introduced according to political party membership and location, while the bureaucrats become known through their correspondence, their emails reflecting their power, status, influence, pettiness, and significance to the text. Various Acts are tabled in the debates, drawing criticism and praise according to political affiliation, and serve to depict daily life in the Canadian province in which the "action" occurs. Births, deaths, illnesses, financial shenanigans, environmental despoilage, murder, political suicide, and more form the substance from which Bursey slyly parodies politicians, hangers-on, office intrigues, and the foibles of human nature.