Posts Tagged ‘benjamin rosenbaum’
A Discussion About The Ant King And Other Stories
When I read ‘Biographical Notes to “A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Air-Planes,” by Benjamin Rosenbaum’ by Benjamin Rosenbaum as part of Feeling Very Strange I said I hoped to say more about Rosenbaum’s fiction. And now I have.
A Discussion About The Ant King And Other Stories between myself, Niall Harrison, Abigail Nussbaum and Dan Hartland has just been published at Torque Control.
‘Biographical Notes to “A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Air-Planes,” by Benjamin Rosenbaum’ by Benjamin Rosenbaum
As the title makes clear, if you want playfully postmodern, Rosenbaum is your guy. In fact it goes beyond playful, it is a massive in-joke. Our narrator is “Benjamin Rosenbaum”, a plausible fabulist, who has just returned from wisconsin, “the World’s Only Gynarchist Plausible-Fable Assembly”. Yeah. It is a clever story but clever in a way that constantly jabs you in the ribs. As a simple adventure story it is fun enough but Rosenbaum’s constant embellishment is rather tiring.
Quality: ***
Slipperiness: **
The whole of Rosenbaum’s debut collection, The Ant King And Other Stories, which includes this story, is available to download under a Creative Commons license. I might say more about it and its clobberingly meta-fictional nature later.
