Martin Amis??!

3:AM Magazine recently had a short interview with Will Ashon in which he mentions my review of The Heritage:

In a recent review I was accused of unhelpfully muddling up realism, para-realism and contra-realism. Actually I’m an infra-realist!

Ashon makes clear that what confounded me (and Colin Greenland) about the novel was designed to confound so fair play to him. More interestingly he talks about his future projects:

One is a very short but quite intense thing about Mike Tyson’s dead mother watching his last fight on a screen attached to her head in an invisible Brownsville, which I have to admit was always going to be a hard sell.

Come on publishers, sign this up!

‘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.

Part of Feeling Very Strange