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The author himself is the main character of this book, in which he glides undisturbed from present to future, from reality to fantasy. Sometimes he's an adolescent Brooklynite, at other times a part-time English teacher, a struggling writer living in a Lower East Side tenement, or a fantasist deftly moving in and out of numerous alter egos. **Lightning Print On Demand Title ... Read more

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Book Week/Chicago Sun-Times June 1968
Ronald Sukenick's first "Novel is captivating , yet painful. For while most of us spend labyrinthian lives hiding what we really feel, this former New York college teacher has that rare, run-naked psyche. Just asjarring is "Up's" fresh form. Spurred by his conviction that thenovel can longer handle reality, Sukenick's book treads a wide path betweeneasy experimentalism and galloping originality, as fiction is strangelyreined to autobiography.

..."how this cultural chaos affectsindividuals...sick of hypocrite jobs sick of kindness to animals sick ofmedia tease sick of packaging sick of insurance salesman sick ofplastic...sick of marriage sick of adultery..."

...The crucial"thing," though, is a man who cannot stop searching passionatelyfor meaning, whether teaching flying a kite along the East River, orloving: "'Make it last,' she kept saying. But it was as if she werearticulating with her body something more like, Get through to me. Helpme."

Saturday Review July 6, 1968
-by Edward M. Potoker-

Ronald Sukenick's "Up" is one of the funniest books of the season, a hilarious outburst of wild comedy that mocks the pretensions of the young, whether they involve op, pop or slop.The book, Sukenick's first full-length fictional work, has a solidintellectual substratum as well, in which serious points are made cooly andwithout the pontifical solemnity some cultural historians require. ... Read more

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Fascinating novel includes autobiographical account of September 11
Ronald Sukenick was in the middle of writing this, his last novel (published posthumously), when he was forced to evacuate his New York apartment because he noticed that the World Trade Center Towers, across the street, had been attacked by terrorists. Weeks later he was able to return home to finish his novel, looking out a window that now had a view over the smoking ruins. All Sukenick's writing is semi-autobiographical-- what Serge Doubrovsky calls "autofiction". In "Last Fall", Sukenick uses his personal experience of 9/11 as the turning point of the novel. What had started out as an inventive, funny, insightful view of the mores of the contemporary art scene in the new Millennium ( which he explains as a 'secret code hidden in the genetic code'), now observes the whole city of NY in post-traumatic stress after 9/11, especially the oh, so self-indulgent art world. Several narrators, in several first-person voices, both male and female, recount the experience. In addition to the gripping and strangely poetic story of his own escape, the novel includes torrid sex scenes, and, unusual for Sukenick, touching moments of tenderness and personal revelation. Probably his best novel. Ronald Sukenick died in 2004. ... Read more

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In Narralogues, Ronald Sukenick continues his important and original contributions to the cutting edge of contemporary fiction. Here he proposes fiction as a medium for telling the truth, while recognizing that the implicit contradiction in these terms is more than cheap paradox. The "narralogues," simultaneously narrative and argument, story and rhetorical pleading, exemplify and argue for fiction as persuasion in a sequence that moves from Socratic dialogue to outright narrative, using throughout all the traditional techniques of fiction, from comedy and irony to suspense and the erotic. ... Read more

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Fiction. In MOSAIC MAN, Ronald Sukenick turns hisinnovative style to the roots of Jewish and Western tradition. Usingthe form of the Old Testament as a contemporary Jewish epic, Sukenickreinvents the Jewish novel in the context of Pop culture, andrepositions it on the cutting edge of millennial America. The book isa mosaic of stories making the case that in our new electronicuniverse the parts are the whole. The experience of a kid in Brooklyn,of an old writer in Venice, of a mystical tourist in Israel, allbecome part of a patchwork identity in quest of a moral culture. ... Read more

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Rain Taxi/Summer 1999 by Matt Dube
Rain Taxi/Summer 1999 by Matt Dube-- Ronald Sukenick's tenth book, MOSAIC MAN, poses difficult questions about the form of the novel and the creative act. Sukenick writes what he calls "heterofiction,"autobiographical narratives that are opened up by fictional conceits....Sukenick's prose is rich and distinctive, with lyrical nods to the Beatsand a Joycean ear for puns. While Sukenick's long reach is at timesfrustrating, it constantly makes the reader aware that he or she is readingan object constructed by human hands. Perhaps it is here, in the book'sunwillingness to cohere and in its wholehearted embrace of its humanorigins, that Sukenick escapes a charge often leveled against otherauthors: that of laying claim to a divine originative role. ... Read more

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Examines Sukenick's role in reshaping the American literary tradition. ... Read more

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A group of people, trying to contend with the failure of hope that took place at the end of the sixties; withdraws from what they call "The Dynasty of the Million Lies" and creates a settlement in the woods of the far west.These refugees from our culture, trying to live a healthy, normal life as pioneers of a latter-day frontier, find they are forced to pay heavily for their retreat in terms of sexuality, death and insanity.The novel consists of three parts: "Frankenstein", "The Children of Frankenstein", and "Palestine".The first section is a disjointed documentary collage expressing the violent chaos of the culture, the second is a narrative about the settlement with its communal and sexual experimentation, and the third, "Palestine", is a utopian vision of Israel that takes place on a perfect kibbutz in which all problems are solved.98.6 is a novel that marks the end of a generation of hope without giving in to hopelessness. ... Read more

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Book Week Chicago Sun Times May 27, 1973
-by Jerome Klinowitz-

Since the late 1960s, when novelist John Barth's declared that literature was "exhausted" and our most popular critics agreed at least that the novel was dead, Ronald Sukenick has beenpatiently proving that there is a great deal of life to be discovered inthe form.

"Out" is, as all novels are supposed to be, a studyof life. ... Read more

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Originally published in 1969, The Death of the Novel and Other Stories remains among the most memorable creations of an unforgettable age. Irrepressibly experimental in both content and form, these anti-fictions set out to rescue experience from its containment within artistic convention and bourgeois morality. Equal parts high modernist aesthete and borscht belt comedian, Sukenick joins avant-garde art with street slang and cartoons, expressing his generation's anxieties by simultaneously mocking and validating them. These are original works by a writer who will try absolutely anything.
... Read more

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Stories which address the strangeness, comedy, and unpredictability of common experience, moving from hyperrealism to a childlike playfulness. ... Read more

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Poststructural Excrement
What to say. I loathed it but i snapped my head into different pieces. I guess that's the best thing to say about it. I still loathed it, though. If you like fiction, don't read it. If you like quasi philosophy masquerading as slick avant blah fiction this is the book for you. ... Read more

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Degenerative Prose is outlaw writing with a terrorist heart. ... Read more

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Great stuff
I think "The Seasons" is a fine story. This book represents a time when writing was pretty wild in the early 1990s. ... Read more

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Sukenick's contemporary answer to Eliot's The Waste Land. ... Read more

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Snoop Dawg Should Read This
This is a fun book, and interesting in a literary sort of way.I thought the writer was new and young but I just found out he's been around forever is like 75 and is an "old master" of the form.

Important and vital book
Sukenick realizes that our neural pathways are being seriously altered by the new technologies (internet, instant communication, information overload, domination of mass media) that we deal with on a daily basis. Especially interesting is Sukenick's appropriation of the B-movie monsters in order to explore the proliferation of conspiracy fears and the way that the powerful can manipulate events.Near the end of the book there is a brilliant section that details a couple's growing fascination with alternative sexual practices.What is so fascinating about Sukenick's writing in these passages is that he leaves small gaps in the narrative that essentially leave out the explicit sexual descriptions.I gave this section to friends of mine and two of them thought it was amazing, one couldn't understand it, and one girl slapped my face saying that it was disgusting.The power of this technique is that our minds fill in the missing parts---essentially creating a truly *interactive* fiction in book form.I also used this section in a mass media class to point out how what we are presented through mass mediums can leave out important sections and that the makers can rely on us to fill the gaps in.

I definitely believe that this is an important and vital book--as is most of Sukenick's fiction.A great example of avant-pop technique.

Perhaps the Kirkus reviewer was looking for some old-style realism (i.e. now-fantasy). END ... Read more

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Individuals try to juggle with their own psyches and the severalsystems of language, economics, politics, and technology that conspireto control and destroy their personal lives. ... Read more

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Excellent
If you are a fan of Stevens's poetry, or, especially, if you are just starting to read his work, this book needs to be on your shelf. The poems of Wallace Stevens are often difficult, and the beginning reader can be tempted to give up in despair.That's a shame, because his poetry is worth the trouble, repays the effort, and it will do so over the rest of your life. Sukenick's book is essentially a straightforward translation manual, and a very good one. Not every poem is found here, but a great many are, including most of the best and most well-known. Sukenick will greatly add to your understanding and enjoyment of what you are reading, and through it you will begin to crack the various aspects of the Stevens Code. Then, fledged, you will begin to fly on your own. It's a flight worth taking. ... Read more

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Thousands of poets from across the Americas have recited their works on the stage of the Guild Complex, Chicago's internationally renowned, cross-cultural literary center. The anthology "Powerlines: A Decade of Poetry from Chicago's Guild Complex," celebrates the first ten years of the award-winning literary center and its publishing wing, Tia Chucha Press, through the words of some of the poets who provided the artistic foundation upon which the organization was built. Every week at the Complex poets from every imaginable layer of society open themselves up to the audience. They lay their hearts and minds on the stage for strangers and friends to inspect. They pick apart the world around them. They extend themselves and search for answers and questions in a communal ritual called a poetry reading. Their words mix Dow-Jones averages with turned out blues, revolutionary chants with appeals for love, outrage at injustice with razor-sharp satire, a Jimi Hendrix guitar solo protesting racism and war, a child's cry against abuse, the meaning of a cicada's sleep, and joy in the sound of a B-flat note. In isolation, the millions of words that have been spoken at the Complex simply hang and then dissipate. But there is an accumulative meaning in the array of voices and ideas that have flowed from the stage. "Powerlines" makes sense of a decade of words.

Poets include Gwendolyn Brooks, Adrienne Rich, Quincy Troupe, Sandra Cisneros, Piri Thomas, Reginald Gibbons, Kimiko Hahn, Elizabeth Alexander, Ana Castillo, Angela Jackson, Haki Madhubut, Patricia Smith, David Hernandez, Michael Anania, Sterling Plumpp, Martha Vertreace, Jack Hirschman, Paul Hoover, Cin Salach, Diane Glancy, Richard Jones, Eugene Redmond, Rohan Preston, Afaa Weaver, Martin Espada, Wanda Coleman, Lisel Mueller, and many others. ... Read more

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An engaging, dizzying examination of Hollywood and fiction
Sukenick's mind-blowing narrative experimentation is the perfect vehicle for expressing the fragmented and constructed world of Hollywood movie-making.The novel looks at how aspiring actress Cathy June becomesentangled in the L.A. scene as the bottom-feeding director Drackenstein andthe avenging fortune teller Ccrab make insidious demands on her voluptuousbody and what remains of her mind. Thanks to Plotz, the spurnedscreenwriter who can't survive his own scripts, Cathy June becomes CloverBottom, the hottest indie starlet in the country. As Ccrab, desperate tokeep Cathy June in his life, literally splits his personality to inhabitDrackenstein, so are Sukenick's readers thrown into visions and re-visionsof characterization, novelization, and exploitation.An incrediblyengaging and ultimately disturbing work, Blown Away accomplishes acriticism of both movie-making and fiction writing equalled only by West'sDay of the Locust. ... Read more