After Yesterday’s Crash

Description

Some of the hottest writers of the 90’s shared a subversive aesthetic sensibility, “avant-pop,” that drew on the forms, images, slogans, characters, and narrative archetypes of our multidimensional, information-dense culture—cartoons, films, music videos, advertising, and rock music—to explore and critically examine that culture.
 
Each of these thirty-two works delves into the deeper metaphorical implications of this pop cultural imagery to convey a turn toward overstimulation and hyper-consumption in American life, and to explore issues of personality and identity. This provocative, stylistically experimental work is truly literature for the twenty-first century.After Yesterday’s CrashLarry McCaffery: “Avant-Pop: Still Life After Yesterday’s Crash” (Editor’s introduction)
Steve Katz: “Current Events”
Rikki Ducornet: “The Exorcist”
William T. Vollmann: “Incarnations of the Murderer”
Tom Robbins: “Moonlight Whoopie Cushion Sonata”
Guillermo Gomez-Pena: from “Border Brujo”
Craig Baldwin: from “Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America”
Mark Leyner: “Oh, Brother”
Steve Erickson: from “Arc d’X”
Don DeLillo: “The Rapture of the Athlete Assumed into Heaven”
Stephen Wright: “Light”
Derek Pell: “Weird Romance”
Susan Daitch: “X = Y”
Robert Coover: “A Lucky Pierre World Premiere”
Lauren Fairbanks: “Victims of Mass Imagination”
William Gibson: “Skinner’s Room”
Harold Jaffe: “Counter Couture” (illustration by Norman Conquest)
Eurudice: “EHMH: A Millennial Romance”
Marc Laidlaw: “Great Breakthroughs in Darkness (Being Early Entries from The Secret Encyclopaedia of Photography)”
Ricardo Cortez Cruz: “Straight Hincty”
Craig Padawer: “Hostile Takeover”
Raymond Federman: “Notes Scribbled in the Dark While Watching Schindler’s List, or What Price Schindler’s Pots and Pans?”
Ronald Sukenick: “Hand Writing on Wall”
Gerald Vizenor: “Stone Columbus: Talk Radio from the Santa Maria Casino”
David Foster Wallace: “Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko”
Ben Marcus: “False Water Society”
Mark Amerika: “Grammatron”
Lynne Tillman: “Bad News”
David Blair: “Ella’s Special Camera: from Waxweb”
Curtis White: “Bonanza”
Paul Auster: “Blackouts”
Bruce Sterling: “Heavy Weather”
Bret Easton Ellis: “End of the 1980s”
Contributors
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