http://www.pr.com/press-release/210496
Author of Wisdom's Maw distributes short story collection freely over
the Internet.
Vancouver, Canada, February 05, 2010 --(PR.com)-- Todd Brendan Fahey,
author of the novel Wisdom's Maw [Far Gone Books, 1996]--surrounding
the CIA's LSD experiments, known as Project MK-ULTRA--has opted to
disperse his collection of black satire, "Dogshit Park & other
atrocities," freely over the Internet.
"Satire hasn't been in vogue in literature--well, probably ever,"
cracks Fahey, in an interview with Mondo 2000 founder R. U. Sirius.
"It is a cast of mind, and which often feels like a curse. Joseph
Heller did it right with Catch-22; Vonnegut lived on it; William S.
Burroughs was it. And of course, Hunter. And they're all gone."
The collection--which includes interviews Fahey conducted with Ken
Kesey and Timothy Leary and aborted fragments--was born of a troubled
marriage, the strain of becoming a university English professor,
despite intense stage fright, and copious quantities of LSD, which,
he admits, "had to that point fueled nearly all of my fiction and
creative nonfiction."
The core stories were constructed in four months, at the turn of
1993, as Fahey says, "in a white heat, basically smashed on acid."
They center, as does all satire, on social discontent--marital
dispute, workplace monotony, avarice and lust, and with a heavy
emphasis on Dogshit Park: "A haven," as he tells it, "for winos and
druggies, in the rich, white student ghetto of Isla Vista," on the
fringes of affluent UC-Santa Barbara campus, where Fahey spent his
first two years of university.
Three of the stories involve the titular locale. Others morph
fragments of the author's adult past--his introductory teaching stint
in Salt Lake City, Utah; a rocky tenure as a doctoral Teaching Fellow
at University of Louisiana-Lafayette, and a special fixation with Amsterdam.
Having run the rounds of the New York literary regime and "the world
of agents," Fahey says: "No way was 'a publisher' going to take this
bunch. And I could have felled trees and spent $5k to get it done
that way [via self publishing], but why?"
Fahey honed his craft within the graduate Professional Writing
Program at USC, studying for two years under Hubert Selby, Jr. (Last
Exit to Brooklyn) and further within University of
Louisiana-Lafayette, where Ernest J. Gaines tolerated his on-paper
antics with bemusement. "He said they seemed right for Penthouse--and
I took it as a compliment," Fahey recalls. (Gaines offered
back-jacket praise for Wisdom's Maw.)
A university professor by trade, Todd Brendan Fahey writes because he
must, acknowledging thus far few fiscal dividends. "Blake died broke
and so did many others. But if it's in you, it's got to come out."
"Dogshit Park & other atrocities" can be found as another Far Gone
Book at: www.dogshitpark.com
--
Contact Information
Far Gone Books
Christopher Hunt
(778) 995-8645
fargone@fargonebooks.com
www.dogshitpark.com
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