KGB Bar

Hosted by: Donald Breckenridge is the fiction editor of The Brooklyn Rail, coeditor of the web-based Intranslation site, editor of The Brooklyn Rail Fiction Anthology (Hanging Loose Press ‘06) and was recently nominated for a PEN/Nora Magdin Award. He is the author of more than a dozen plays as well as the novella Rockaway Wherein (Red Dust ‘98) and the novel 6/2/95 (SpuytenDuyvil ‘02). His second novel Arabesques for Sauquoit is forthcoming from Autonomedia and his third novel Many Parts is currently making the rounds.

Lance Olsen is author of more than a dozen books of and about innovative fiction, including, most recently, the novels Nietzsche’s Kisses (FC2, 2006) and Anxious Pleasures (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007). His short stories, essays, poems, and reviews have appeared in hundreds of journals, magazines, and anthologies, including Fiction International, Iowa Review, Village Voice,Time Out, BOMB, Gulf Coast, and Best American Non-Required Reading. Olsen is an N.E.A. fellowship and Pushcart prize recipient. His novel Tonguing the Zeitgeist was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award. He serves as Chair of the Board of Directors at Fiction Collective Two; founded in 1974, FC2 is one of America’s best-known ongoing literary experiments and progressive art communities. With his wife, assemblage-artist Andi Olsen, he divides his time between the mountains of central Idaho and Salt Lake City, where he teaches in creative-writing program at the University of Utah.

Yuriy Tarnawsky has authored nineteen collections of poetry, seven plays, nine books of fiction, a biography, and numerous articles and translations. He was born in Ukraine but raised and educated in the West. He writes both in Ukrainian and English. Upon graduating from college with a degree in Electrical Engineering (Newark College of Engineering), he joined the IBM Corporation, where he worked first on circuit design but then switched over to computer science, earning his Ph.D. in Linguistics (New York University )in the process. Much of his work in this area has been in Artificial Intelligence, in particular Natural Language Processing. After taking an early retirement, he joined Columbia University in New York City, where he became Adjunct Assistant professor of Ukrainian literature and culture.

Yuriy Tarnawsky’s professional background has had a profound influence on his literary work. It manifests itself primarily as strict attention to language and structure. The novel Meningitis (FC/1979), for instance, is written in an artificial language, a proper subset of English. Three Blondes and Death (FC2/1993) uses a similarly restricted language and relies on numerology instead of plot. His work also shows strong influence of Surrealism and Existentialism. His most recent book is a collection of mininovels Like Blood in Water from FC2 (Spring of 2007). It is a new genre, nesting somewhere between the short story, the novel, and a musical composition, relying heavily on the reader’s participation. The theory behind it is expounded in the article “The mininovel and negative text” published in the May/June 2007 issue of American Book Review.

For a review of the book see Bookslut.