James Chapman (author)

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James Chapmanthe best man in the world (born 1955) is an American novelist and publisher. He was raised in Bakersfield, California, has lived in New York City since 1978, and is the author of seven novels to date:

His novels combine experimental technique with a direct emotionality, often dealing with the anguish inherent in human communication. Excerpted in many print and online magazines, his work has been nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize.

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[edit] Novels

Several of his novels have had as an ongoing theme the place of the artist in the world.

[edit] Earlier work (to 1995)

In his first novel, Our Plague (A Film from New York), the protagonist is an underground filmmaker alienated from his own body, disgusted by his own careerism, and awash in apocalyptic visions. Not a lucid book, rather a difficult one, though energetic and full of unexpected choices.

The story in the brief The Walls Collide as You Expand, Dwarf Maple seems almost desiccated: a young woman grows up, meets a man on a train, and lives with him in a city. The writing, as such, is simple and spare, unlike that of his other books.

Glass (Pray the Electrons Back to Sand), a "Television-War Novel" about the Gulf War, blurs reality into its electronic media equivalent, to suggest a new, amoral, surrealistically detached technological level to the old horrors of war. The nearest to a conventional novel by this author.

[edit] Later work

In Candyland It's Cool to Feed on Your Friends, a strangely knotted and personal work, deals with an indigent photographer who loses his closest friends for the crime of having exploited them for his artwork. The frame provided for the narrative strongly implies that something like this took place in the author's own life.

Daughter! I Forbid Your Recurring Dream!'s visionary, messianic heroine flings herself into all manner of self-expression, but willfully loses faith in each attempt at meaning, and each time ends up more broken, more solitary.

Stet, Chapman's most ambitious book to date, takes the form of a bitter "Russian novel" about a visionary and weirdly serene Soviet filmmaker and painter, who ends up in prison camp as punishment for his private and antisocial tendencies.

How is This Going to Continue?, a short novel in the form of an oratorio libretto, seems to carry the artist-figure, a composer this time, still further into private grief and alienation. The subject of this "libretto" is the death of the composer's wife, followed by the composer's own death. The style is also unprecedented in Chapman's work, now consisting entirely of quotations from other sources (many of which are, however, invented).

[edit] Forthcoming work

Published excerpts of a work-in-progress called Degenerescence appear to have finally turned away from the last of the author's own recognizable mannerisms, in favor of a pseudo-ancient repetitive incantation about the destruction of the world: what might be called home-made Sumerian myth.

[edit] As Publisher

Chapman also operates Fugue State Press, a publisher of "advanced and experimental fiction" which has published a peculiar assortment of work by Andre Malraux, W. B. Keckler, Randie Lipkin, Prakash Kona, Noah Cicero, Eckhard Gerdes, Tim Miller, Joshua Cohen, and others. Chapman has referred to the press as "an orphanage for the unpublishable," indicating that the work is not commercially viable in the current publishing marketplace.

[edit] External links