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STATEMENTS: New Fiction from the Fiction Collective by Jonathan -- Ed. Baumbach

STATEMENTS: New Fiction from the Fiction Collective

By

Pub Date: April 1st, 1975
Publisher: Braziller

Maybe this is where the Fiction Collective begins in earnest: with 27 healthy, iconoclastic voices in unison, a pick.and-choose sampler of the non-commercial little-review people -- the ones who write for something, whatever it is, besides the dollar. Ronald Sukenick's introduction finds these stories ""hard to categorize,"" and suggests it's not so much the novel as it is the militancy of aesthetics that's dead. So fiction's on the loose, it's up for grabs and anyone, of any persuasion, ""from social realism to Surfiction,"" can join this club. . . . Not quite, of course; we read these pieces by Abish, Ashbery, Banks, Baumbach, Brownstein, Charyn, Codrescu, Elevitch, Horovitz, Katz, Major, Mirsky, Molinaro, Reed, Skillings, Spielberg, Strand and friends, and there is one thing they have very much in common -- a somewhat macabre sense of humor, sharpened to various cutting edges. They also, as a group, seem to enjoy a good surprise and to disdain the conventions of verisimilitude. We won't name favorites or betes noires. That would be undemocratic and likely to cause puff and ego in the only cell extant -- unorganized, unnamed as it may be -- of young writers with the gumption to thumb a collective nose at tradition or its bastard child, bestsellerdom.