The Neglected Books Page

Knopf’s Borzoi Puppies – An Experiment in Experimental Fiction

27 July 202327 July 2023

The Seventies were weird. A lot of long-established conventions faltered or were kicked over, a lot of idealistic ventures were launched, often fueled more by hope than resources, and many institutions grabbed desperately at innovations they gambled would turn into lifelines. One such experiment was Alfred A. Knopf’s brief series of dust jacketless, shiny-covered hardbacks that championed the work of young American writers playing around with fictional forms and styles — a series referred to as “Borzoi puppies” after Knopf’s legendary Borzoi Books. Knopf launched the series by promising to break new ground between traditional hardbacks and cheap mass market paperbacks, offering “new novels at plausible prices.” The plausible price in 1971 was $3.50. (According to USInflationCalculator.com, this is equivalent to $26.37 today. By comparison, another Knopf title from the same year, Thomas Bernhard’s Gargoyles, sold for $5.95 or $44.82 in 2023. Which goes to show that despite what some folks think, the price of new books today has not remotely kept pace with inflation.)

If you’re a veteran of American used book stores, you may have come across one or more of these. Fifty years later, they still standout on any shelf: such slick spines are more often confined to textbooks and high-end vanity publications. That look was the first thing to attract the interest of people covering the publishing industry. Reporting on the initiative in the New York Times, Joan Baum wrote, “At the risk of emphasizing the container at the expense of the contained, it should be noted at once that these slim volumes are bound in strikingly handsome overboards with back photos of the authors and cover designs that evoke the mood and subject matter within.”

Bill Katz (who later compiled Writer’s Choice, a cornucopia of neglected book recommendations, with his wife Linda Sternberg Katz), introduced the series to his fellow librarians in a piece in Library Journal:

With In the Animal Kingdom and Burnt Toast, Knopf initiates a program of publishing new fiction by young novelists at a reasonable price. The books are just slightly smaller than the ordinary novel, bound in paper over boards, and nicely produced, with attractive covers and good, wide margins. Each of the present works has as its hero a youth engaged in a version of the ancestor quest, familiar through anthropology, by which manhood is achieved. And, though the two books are very different in style and tone, each has a large component of ritual. These initial selections evidently were made with an eye to capturing two segments of the youth market: the English-major set, who may be impressed with Warren Fine’s impacted manipulations of time sequence and narrative voice; and the flower-child communards, to whom Peter Gould’s unremitting ingenuousness may appeal.

The series was short-lived: Knopf published four titles in 1971 and four more in 1972. By 1973, it was dead and forgotten. Dead probably because Knopf lost money on them — or at least (such is the logic of the market), didn’t make enough money. But unjustly forgotten, in my view. So, here is my attempt commemorate this experiment.

• Burnt Toast, by Peter Gould

Peter Gould’s amiable autobiographical novel about life on a Vermont farm with a sort-of commune of friends was a perfect introduction for the series. “We consulted the oracle when this book was first begun,” read Gould’s dedication. “This is what came up: ‘Innocence (The Unexpected)’.” The optimism of innocence, or maybe the innocence of optimism, was behind both Knopf’s investment and the creative spirit of these writers. Each of these books was an attempt to change the world, or at least evidence that the belief that fiction could change the world was still alive and kicking.

The farm in question had already been celebrated in Raymond Mungo’s nonfiction book of the year before, Total Loss Farm: A Year in the Life. As often happens, Gould’s version was more earnest and less commercially successful. His hero, Silent, and a character named V.D.C. (for “Very Decent Citizen”) enter forthrightly and energetically into the task of farming and community building and take each setback with a mixture of wonder and resilience. Joan Baum wrote that rather than trying to turn his work into a book, Gould should have “tacked it up instead on the hardwoods in Vermont and read it aloud to the community for free.”

You can purchase Peter Gould’s more recent nonfictional account of his experiences at Total Loss Farm, Horse-Drawn Yogurt, on his website, PeterGouldVermont.com.

Covers of Their Family and In the Animal Kingdom by Warren Fine, illustrations by James Grashow

• In the Animal Kingdom and Their Family, by Warren Fine

Warren Fine had more ambition that all his series-mates combined, and it shows in these two books, which have accumulated a tiny but loyal following over the years. In the Animal Kingdom and Their Family tell related stories that revolve around Orcus Berrigan and Gerhard Blau, who desert the revolutionary American army and head into the wilderness that is now the Midwest. They become trappers and Berrigan settles with an Indian woman known as Marie or Sawpootway. Their Family is Blau’s fantasy of what happens to Berrigan and Sawpootway in the years after the two men parted. Where In the Animal Kingdom is rhapsodical and profane, Their Family blends realism and visions, particularly as experienced by Sawpootway:

In the dream, her hands covered her ears; if she put her hands upon the sewing in her lap, she’d have to listen to words about Legget. She reached for the sewing, needing its confirmation: a voice spoke of her existence in an old life. The voice said nothing of Legget; her sewing disappeared beneath her fingers, and she didn’t miss it. Dutchess rose out of the water, lake water still and deep. The man, from her first dream, perhaps Legget, perhaps Thurlow, perhaps… The man from her first dream, a shape shifting, threw Dutchess into an oven, where, cooked, she became Sawpootway. In the oven, she bled forever from her womb, and no man would touch her. The man departed, betraying her as if he were one, now laughing at his joke, who’d already died, long before.

Something in Fine’s work set reviewers’ teeth on edge:

Warren Fine is a devotee of the “Faulknerian” school of writing: using endless, snake-like sentences and relying on purple prose to tell poetic rather than objective truth. If you believe that reality is mysteriously subjective and that a tale can never be told simply, then Their Family is your literary cup of commas, diluted with pitchers full of colons and sweetened by tablespoons full of semi-colons.

It’s hard to see what the fuss was about. “Faulknerian” is actually off the mark, in my view. The real tip-off to Fine’s creative inspiration is in his dedication in In the Animal Kingdom: “For John Hawkes.” Fine was probably the closest any writer came to following in “the school of Hawkes” (or is it “Hawkesian”?), with its mixture of mystical eroticism and precise, at times painful, concrete details.

And, it must be said, a clear invocation of the spirit of Walt Whitman in the opening to In the Animal Kingdom:

In America, I throw my single voice about like a ventriloquist; like an evangelist—ox, eagle, ass, or winged man, play my various tongues, both intimate and distant voices cast from my mouth, as if fishlines spread to flickering sheets, become so much like fish themselves, like blades and flames, to catch my experience in the animal kingdom, to come into my story, feeling as if with my tongue, to know again, and know mostly now, the process of my adventure in the flesh, as all tongues, like castaways returning through my mouth, reenter and descend into my present body.

Warren Fine never managed to publish another book after these two novels. He taught at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, often holding class in the Zoo Bar off campus, then moved to the University of Kansas in Lawrence, where he was found dead in his apartment in 1987 at the age of 44. His passing was marked by his favorite bartender in the Lincoln Star: “He drank, he gambled, he was lax about his health and his taxes. He hurt some wonderful women and they left him. They had no choice. He was desperately self-destructive… I know he believed the first rule of being a writer: write an awful lot.” Fine’s papers at the UNL archives include the manuscripts of dozens of stories and at least one unpublished novel.

The two striking cover illustrations are by James Grashow.

cover of Arkansas Adios by Earl Mac Rauch

• Arkansas Adios, by Earl Mac Rauch

I’ve got to be honest about this one. There was a period, maybe from the early 1960s into the early 1980s, when Playboy magazine used to publish serious fiction in between the ads and nudes. Serious, often innovative, but also tending to fall into a certain rut that was even narrower and more identifiable than the supposed New Yorker school of spare short stories in which nothing happens (I’m citing the stereotype here). That rut was usually comic, often ribald, and pretty much always confined to male authors.,/dd>

I don’t know if Earl Mac Rauch ever published in Playboy, but if you wanted to get a good sense of what the Playboy school (or perhaps, playground) of fiction was like, give Arkansas Adios a read. It’s about a precocious eleven-year-old boy growing up in Red Mound, Arkansas and his picaresque adventures — at least, as picaresque as you can get on a fat-tired bicycle. One of his adventures involves playing a trick on the town’s prostitute. If that sounds like comic gold to you, you’ll probably love this book. Bearing in mind that Rauch published his first novel, Dirty Pictures from the Prom, while an undergraduate at Darmouth, I can be excused for describing the humor as sophmoric.

Reviewing the book for the Boston Globe, Richard Pearce wrote, “More than anything else, Rauch leads us from one episode to the next in anticipation of some mind-blowing joke that lies just beyond the novel’s reach.” Pearce rated the book “a minor by singular accomplishment like that of a Pogo or Snoopy cartoon,” which in my opinion is an insult to Walt Kelly and Charles Schultz.

Rauch does play around with fictional conventions, giving his characters dialogue balloons at one point, but I’m stretching to class this with the other books on the list as experimental fiction. His main claim to fame is his screenplay and novelization of the cult movie The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai.

Cover of Riches and Fame and the Pleasures of Sense by Kathy Black

• Riches and Fame and the Pleasures of Sense, by Kathy Black

Riches and Fame and the Pleasures of Sense is about a Barnard graduate named Betty who’s trying to get a book called Riches and Fame and the Pleasures of Sense published — that is, once she’s written in. In search of material, she interviews friends and old classmates and spends time in Paris with her boyfriend Arnold.

The book is filled with snippets. Snippets of the interviews, of Betty’s notebooks, of a play she wrote in elementary school, of letters to editors, of thoughts on such topics as “Modern Youth Searches for an Identity.” Even a snippet of an author’s apology to the reader:

“I started writing this book because I wanted to write something and because I needed something to write about so K said “Why not ask girls about their future plans” said K. In college you never think about the distant future said Arnold. So here it is, the distant future.

All this would quickly grow insufferable were it not for Kathy Black’s winning acknowledgement that since we’re following along with her wanderings, she owes the reader a chuckle or accurate insight every page or so. As the New York Times reviewer, Thomas Lask, wrote, Black manages to capture the spirit of a certain segment of American youth on the cusp of a new decade: “The goodwill of these young people, their desire to redress injustice, to make the world better, to do something about the deep stores of guilt that lie in their hearts all shine through their immaturity, their quixotic and sometimes dangerous behavior.”

As far as I can tell, this was Kathy Black’s only book.

Cover of Saw by Steve Katz

• Saw, by Steve Katz

Of all the authors represented in the Borzoi puppies, Steve Katz was the most committed to experimental fiction as both cause and form. He founded the Fiction Collective (still going strong, yay!) with fellow experimentalists Walter Abish, Ronald Sukenick, et al., and never lost his love of play in every aspect of writing and publishing. His first novel, The Exagggerations of Peter Prince includes photos, illustrations, one-, two-, and four-column texts, and even a full-page set of exit doors in case the reader feels like quitting. His short story collection Creamy and Delicious (recently republished by Tough Poets Press) has been called the best embodiment of Pop Art in fictional form (and, I’m happy to note, is currently ranked as the 2506th greatest fiction book of all time according to TheGreatestBooks.org).

Saw could be seen as Steve Katz’s riff on J. G. Ballard, at least J. G. Ballard’s disaster novels of an Earth subject to relentless heat, rising sea levels, crystalization, and blistering winds. In this case, the disaster is garbage. It’s set in a New York City swimming in garbage: “Garbage heaps. Garbagy air, people wander around in the garbage, kicking it up underfoot, sucking it into their lungs, kissing it into each other’s mouth. The Garbage Age, not the Space Age or the Computer Age.” And when a couple manage begin enjoying a gourmet meal of asparus and veal Milanese, their apartment is invaded by “the fetid grimy rabble of the streets nobody loves. They drag with them some garbage cans full of steamy putrid stuff, and plastic bages full of sodden trash.”

So … how does this relate to the astronaut on the cover? Well, the Astronaut is Steve Katz, who is watching the garbage-piled world and us the reader and reserving his right to remain the impassive observer — or to descend and reorganize the world as a new Creator. If you have any familiarity with fragmentary fiction, you will be able to enjoy Saw. If not, you may feel like the New York Times reviewer, who claimed his ARC fell apart and left him with scattered pages and Chapter 7 following Chapter 17. Which I suspect Steve Katz would have told him was a darned good novel, too. Kirkus Reviews took a more tolerant view, saying it was “simply a charming book that amuses the reader as it gently deposits him from one place to another, with a minimum of fuss and a maximum of pleasure if you’re so minded.”

Saw is in print, at least according to the website of the University of Alabama Press.

Cover of The Log of the S. S. Mrs. Unguentine by Stanley Crawford

• Log of the S. S. The Mrs. Unguentine, by Stanley Crawford

Stanley Crawford’s first novel, Gascoyne was a broad-brush satire of the American way of enterprise, something not too dissimilar from Stanley Elkin’s early novels or Max Apple’s wonderful collection The Oranging of America. His second — let’s call it The Log for short — represents the fabulist strain of 1970s American experimentalism. Mrs. Unguentine spends forty years as the partner and shipmate of Unguentine, the captain of barge full of plants, odd machines, and miscellaneous junk. They wander the sea aimlessly — literally: Unguentine “had been steering all those years with no idea of what he was steering towards.”

Eventually the S. S. The Mrs. Unguentine becomes something of an ecosystem onto itself — a state both cozy and comforting and profoundly isolating. Until one day when Unguentine falls overboard. Though this comes to seem to Mrs. Unguentine as less an event then a condition, a state that may or may not persist: “[T]here seems to be no longer any precise moment when old Unguentine vanished from my life, it seems rather an almost gradual process that went on over many years and as part of a great rhythm, as if, through some gentle law of nature, his disappearance would be followed by his gradual reemergence, that he would come back, so on, so forth.”

The Log was the beloved secret book of a handful of readers for years, but now it’s back in print and available from the Dalkey Archive.

Cover of Motorman by David Ohle

• Motorman, by David Ohle

People who wax about how weird and unsettling Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood is need to read Motorman. The short novel has enough strangeness to fill a 400-page novel. The Motorman is Moldenke, who is kept alive by the transplanted hearts of several sheep and spends much of his days feeling guilt for having killed some jellyheads (who are people … maybe … sort of) and resisting the competing influence of Bunce, the “Bust’em or Burn’em Big Brother,” and Burnheart, the Organ Transplant King.

In his introduction to the Calamari Archives reissue of Motorman, Ben Marcus writes of the awe with which the few people he knew who were aware of the book — let alone had read it — spoke of it: “For a long time I was scared to read Motorman. It had come recommended to me in such hushed tones that it sounded disruptively incendiary and illegal. Not only would the reader of this crazed novel burn to ashes, apparently, but he might be posthumously imprisoned for reading the book—a jar of cinder resting in a jail cell.”

One of the striking aspects about Knopf’s backing this series is that they were able to get a book like Motorman reviewed in dozens of newspaper book sections around the country — even papers like the Fresno Bee. The downside, however, was that they couldn’t prevent reactions like this: “This particular book, a first novel, is a bummer. It is not good writing by any standard. There is no real creativity and certainly no redeeming social value. Is Ohle’s purpose to put a copy of Motorman into every spaced-out acid-head’s hands?” Well, Motorman did get into the hands of some spaced-out acid-heads as well as into the hands of a few lovers of envelope- and mind-expanding fiction who carried a torch for David Ohle’s odd book until, within the last decade or so, it’s begun to be recognized as a significant and complex work.

Having read half of them, I must say upfront that I don’t think any of them, with the possible exception of David Ohle’s Motorman, can be considered a classic. But neither are these complacent books. For literature to remain vital, it has to keep changing, and part of that change depends on writers who are willing to take risks and try things without the guarantee of success. While Knopf’s venture was probably a commercial failure, it would be a mistake to consider any of these books a critical failure. Not everything works. But there is something good in each of them and something for other writers to learn from. And for that alone, these puppies deserve to be remembered.

Richard Kostelanetz Recommends 13 Neglected Classics of Experimental Fiction

27 December 2019

Richard-Kostelanetz-Artist-Leonid-Drozner — Portrait of Richard Kostelanetz by Leonid Drozner

Among the eye-opening/mind-opening experiences of my undergraduate days was discovering the marvelous world of experimental fiction. As with many other adolescent American males, Kurt Vonnegut was my gateway to this genre-bending genre, Donald Barthelme my first mainstream exemplar. The Fiction Collective had just opened its doors a couple of years earlier; Paul Metcalf had just published his farewell to traditional narrative in his collage, Apalache. One of my guides was a book I picked up somewhere in late 1976: Richard Kostelanetz’s anthology, Breakthrough Fictioneers (1973) — which remains, in my view, the best single compilation some forty years later.

I was delighted, therefore, when Richard agreed to let me share the following essay, originally intended for David Madden’s Rediscoveries II, in which writers ranging from Alfred Appel to Richard Yates recommended favorite books worth bringing back into print. Richard’s recommendations exceeded Madden’s quota, so this list didn’t see print back in 1988. It is, however, available in Person of Letters, a 2013 collection of his literary essays, and will also be included in the forthcoming Unfamiliar Appreciations.

IDENTIFYING MORE EXPERIMENTAL FICTION (1988)

An invitation from David Madden proposed that I rediscover a single neglected book title for a symposium he was editing. In reply I proposed to “do best by you if I wrote about several works of experimental fiction from the late 1960s.” He replied, “The concept of the book is that fiction writers write about their one book of fiction that needs rediscovery, rather than an article about several.” I tell him that his requirement of only one title falsifies my sense of what needs to be rediscovered now. He responded with a contract offering me fifty dollars and serial rights, nonetheless insisting that I should “focus on only one book of each writer invited to contribute: 40 writers, 40 rediscovered books.” He continues, “One essay that discussed a good number of writers, without focusing on one, would scatter the focus of our book.”

Well, my friend Madden should have remembered what I think about limitations, especially when they inhibit convictions of importance; and he should have remembered as well my own efforts, in editing anthologies, to transcend any sense of lockstep and perfunctory uniformity.

Since he sent me a contract (but wasn’t paying me enough to ensure that I play by his rules), he got the essay that, given his purposes, I thought he should have, dealing with many 1960s fictions that made radical discoveries. I offered a plethora of titles that were published in what now appears to have been the most fertile time for profoundly innovative literature in this country. (If only we knew then how unique those times were!)

Madden’s letters conjured the vision of publishers reissuing the books we rediscovered; but since he was talking about single volumes, I thought to propose a gigantic book as an addition to the Library of America, or some avant-garde equivalent (perhaps on computer disc), that would include within a single set of covers, notwithstanding differences in format and design, the following thirteen books of masterful innovative fiction:

Frederic Tuten’s The Adventures of Mao on the Long March (1971), which mixes paragraphs of conventional historical narrative with fictitious incidents such as Greta Garbo propositioning Mao, and such extrinsic material as verbatim (but unidentified) quotations from a variety of literary sources (e.g., Jack London’s The Iron Heel, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun, Marx-Engels on the origins of the family and Lord knows what else). It’s all very erudite and subtly funny.
Emmett Williams’s Sweethearts (1967), in which the title word is subject to sequential typographic variations that, as you turn its pages in Hebraic sequence, evoke a heterosexual relationship, introducing the possibility, still scarcely explored, of writing visual fiction with minimal verbal material. (A shorter fiction on the same theme is Norman H. Pritchard’s brilliant “Hoom” [1970], published in Ishmael Reed’s 19 Necromancers from Now (1970). Here two-page spreads filled entirely with “sh” are punctuated by a progressively increasing number of spreads with other kind of wordless typographical arrangements.)
Richard Horn’s Encyclopedia (1969), in which alphabetized notations (filled with cross-references worth following) weave an ambiguous fiction about human interrelatonships, paradoxically disordering by reordering and thus forcing the reader to pursue his or her own path in experiencing the fiction. (Why haven’t we heard from this author again? He seemed too sophisticated to be a one-shot. Someone once suggested Horn’s name might be a pseudonym for Gilbert Sorrentino, who worked as an editor at Horn’s publisher around that time; but Sorrentino’s own novels are not quite so good.)
Richard Hefter and Martin Stephen Moskof’s Shufflebook (1971), ostensibly a juvenile composed of a pack of cards, one side of which contains “and the [name of an animal],” while the other side has just verbs. The sequence of possible combinations is nearly infinite, and merely for approaching that concept in a book of fiction Shufflebook, notwithstanding its slick and trivial contents, is valuable. (Another novel-on-cards from this period that should have appeared as a book [and still could] is Eleanor Antin’s 100 Boots [1970], photos of which came in my mail once every fortnight. As the herd of shoes is seen in various settings, they become the anthropomorphic protagonist of an extended narrative.)
Ed Sanders’s Shards of God (1970), which is filled with obscenity at its stylistically finest. Not unlike Tuten, Sanders reinvents history, so that, say, the ghost of Che Guevara really wants nooky, or a bourgeois lady consorts with hippies in order to collect “tool drool.” (The first word in the title incidentally means heaps of cowdung and the last word announces the underlying theme of sustained blasphemy.)
Kenneth Gangemi’s Olt (1969), which portrays in exquisitely measured sentences the pathology of a man unable to regard one thing as more important than another. Also, by making his sentences so complete that each can stand apart from any paragraph, Gangemi revealed a possibility for minimal fiction composed of autonomous sentences.
William Melvin Kelley’s Dunfords Travels Everywhere(1970), which is stylistically the most innovative fiction of a once-promising novelist less visible later.
G. F. Gravenson’s The Sweetmeat Saga (1971), in which the disappearance of pop music stars named Sweetmeat, brother and sister famous since their youth, are portrayed in fragments splayed rectilinearly across the manuscript pages, its language drawing upon the elliptical style of wire services and its typography upon typewriters (so that the manuscript itself had to be photocopied for definitive publication).
Duane Michals’s Sequences (1970), which contains stories told entirely in wordless photographs. My own favorite has always been “The Lost Shoe,” whose first image shows a deserted urban street on which a man, seen only from behind, is walking away from the camera and up the street. In the second frame he drops on the pavement a blurred object that in the third frame is seen to be a lady’s shoe. This frame, as well as the next two, suggest that he departs up the street in a great hurry. In the sixth frame the man is nowhere to be seen while the shoe is mysteriously on fire. The realism of the photographs starkly contrasts with the mysteriousnes of the plot, while large changes between frames accent the absolute immobility of the camera. For this last reason the authorial perspective is, to my senses, as Chekhovian as both the work’s title and its passive acceptance of something inexplicably forbidding. Although “The Lost Shoe” begins as a photographic sequence, its ultimate impact is decidedly fictional.
Raymond Federman’s Double or Nothing (1972), which resembles Michals in making the page itself the basic narrative unit; however, instead of photographs, Federman uses language shaped into a wide variety of one-page visual typewritten forms that, like The Sweetmeat Saga, had to be offset directly for publication (and are likewise fundamentally about the possibilities of arraying typewritten words on 8 1/2″ by 11″ pages, in the historic era just before computer-assisted printing!). Through these set-pieces, which reveal an unfaltering capacity for formal invention, Federman weaves several sustained preoccupations, including the narrator’s immigration to America, his poverty here, his obsessive memories, his parsimonious passion for noodles. No other “novel” looks like Federman’s contemporary reworking of Kafka’s Amerika, which was written fifty years before; yet no other in this selection is quite so rich in traditional sorts of “content.” (Mention of Federman would be incomplete without acknowledging his bilingual masterpiece, Take It or Leave It [1976], which is likewise about coming to America. However, because this text entwines two languages, it should be available on audiocassettes in addition to its initial form as print, thus putting to shame all those cassette bowdlerizations of pop books that were themselves bowdlerized before ever getting into print!
Madeline Gins’s Word Rain (1969), which by now is commonly regarded as the most extreme example of self-reflexive fiction. Steve Katz, writing recently in Michigan Quarterly Review, characterized it as “a playful, serene book that puts self-reflexivity to rest forever.” The first sign of this book’s unusual concerns and its equally rare humor is its extended subtitle: “(or A Discursive Introduction to the Philosophical Investigations to G,R,E,T,A,G,A,R,B,O, It Says”; a second is the incorporation of several concerns indigenous to other books on this list—special languages, expressive design, extrinsically imposed forms. “The saddest thing is that I have to use words,” announces Gins’s narrator, not only echoing the opening sentence of Ford Madox Ford’s fictional study of human opacity, The Good Soldier (1915), but also exemplifying that Gertrude Steinian paradox of using language to reveal both the limitations of language and the reading process.
Rather than developed in any step-by-step way, this last theme of linguistic opacity is reiterated in every section of Word Rain suggesting that the indicatively unpaginated book is best read in snatches as opposed to straight through. (The same advice can be tendered to anyone facing Finnegans Wake.) That style that is also the book’s subject is revealed through a variety of opaque styles, one of which is a classic example of verbal elegance entwined with incomprehensibility:
Each word on the page seemed ossified. The word face was a stone. The word guess was a flint. The words a, the, in, by, up, it, were pebbles. The word laughter was marble. Run was cartilage. Shelf was bone. Talk was an oak board. See was made of quartz. The word refrigerator was enameled. The word attention was concrete. The word iron was iron. The word help was wrought-iron. The word old was crag. The word touch was brick. The word read was mica and I was granite.
I have read this passage aloud dozens of times in the course of lectures, and have never ceased to marvel at its purity.
In the pages of Word Rain are numerous inventive displays of printed material: lists of unrelated words with dots between them, whole sides filled mostly with dashes where words might otherwise be, pseudo-logical proofs, passages in which the more mundane expressions are crossed out, an appendix of “some of the words (temporary definitions) not included,” even a photographed hand holding both sides of a printed page, and a concluding page of print-over-print that reads at its bottom: “This page contains every word in the book.” Though Word Rain suffers from a peril of its theme—a linguistic resistance that prevents most readers from discovering its purposes and from entering its imaginative world—it will always be an American classic to me.
Frank Kuenstler’s Lens (1964, and thus slightly earlier that the other books mentioned here), which is the most sustained example I know of prose acoherence (which is the literary analogue of musical atonality), not only from word to word but at times also from letter to letter:
mm.Pris. metier.AAA. prime.Airies. numbers.Racquet. comma.Dei. rr.1919
This opening line establishes a style that is sustained to similar widths for 81 pages, each with type ten inches high. Only recently did I become aware of this book, which contains the sort of audacious innovation we associate with the American imagination at its finest.
Claes Oldenburg’s Store Days (1967 is a book-length ironic fiction about an exhibition full of objects similar to his famous early sculpture of a soft hamburger, all placed into a Lower East Side store a few years before—the book bearing as much resemblance to its subject as those objects did to what they purport to represent. (Why Oldenburg spends so much time with world-famous sculpture and the like, when he could become a great avant-garde writer, utterly mystifies me.)

OTHER TITLES TOWARD A SECOND VOLUME (OR COMPUTER DISC):

John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse (1968), which represents the apex of his career as an experimental fictioner.
Nicholas Delbanco’s Consider Sappho Burning (1969); ditto.
Steve Katz’s The Exagggerations of Peter Prince (1967); ditto.
Ron Sukenick’s The Death of the Novel (1968); ditto.
Kenneth King’s uncollected prose (which a small press run by me has been trying to put into print for years now, in spite of persistent neglects and scandals at funding agencies)

YET OTHER TITLES TOWARD A THIRD WHATEVER:

Willard Bain’s Informed Sources (1969), Frederick Barthelme’s Rangoon (1971), Stanley Berne’s The Unconscious Victorious (1969), Marvin Cohen’s A Self-Devoted Friend (1967), S. Foster Damon’s The Moulton Tragedy (1970), Wally Depew’s Once (1971), Irvin Faust’s The Steagle (1967), Dick Higgins’s A Book About Love & War & Death (1972), Harry Mathews’s Tlooth (1966), Edward Ruscha’s Crackers (1969), Lucas Samaras’s Samaras Album (1971), Eugene Wildman’s Nuclear Love (1972), Arlene Zekowski’s Seasons of the Mind (1969).

TOWARD A FOURTH:

Three anthologies that should be credited with efforts to establish taste, rather than exploit reputations previously established: Jerry Bowles’s This Book Is a Movie (1971), Eugene Wildman’s Experiments in Prose (1969), and my own Future’s Fictions (1971).

Canadian addenda are worth including, if you consider, as I still do, Anglophone Canadian literature to be a neglected zone within American English-language literature: bp Nichol’s Two Novels (1969) and Chris Scott’s Bartleby (1971), in addition to M. Vaughn-James’s Elephant (1970) and The Projector (1971), both of which by now seem to be precursors for the more accomplished visual-verbal fictions of Paul Zelevansky (an American).

By the late 1980s [and even two decades later], I look back upon these books and thus this period of 1966 to 1972 as a time when a developing avant-garde fortunately found publishing channels. Nearly all of these titles came from profit-making publishers, in sum reminding us that, even though manuscripts for similarly innovative books of fiction exist today, we don’t see them as often from either commercial houses or those smaller publishers dependent upon grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. At a time when mediocrity (of different kinds) prevails, it is salutary to remember what had been and thus could be done.

This essay is the best I can do for you now, David, contributing to your theme of rediscovering lost fiction without succumbing to your unnecessary requirements for uniformity. Should the conventions of your Rediscoveries II require you to attribute this baker’s dozen to a single author, consider the Great Avant-God who teaches at the University of Skies (and, alas, does not seem to be around much anymore).