Just finished: “Spring-Heeled Jim” is James Reich’s contribution to The Anti-Oedipus Press/Equus Press anthology on the centennial of James Joyce’s Ulysses.
From the publishers:
James Joyce’s ULYSSES was, at first, a failure. Its serialization in the American journal THE LITTLE REVIEW between 1918 and 1920 earned the novel (and the journal) an obscenity trial for pornography. Too hot to handle for any major English or American publisher, the full manuscript was published in 1922 by Sylvia Beach through the bookstore imprint Shakespeare & Company. The small print-run of 1,000 copies met with mixed, contesting reviews. A hundred years later, ULYSSES stands as one of the few indisputable beacons of high modernism, experimentalism, and all forms of innovative writing. Bent on erecting monuments for genuflection, critics and academics have embalmed ULYSSES into the exquisite corpse it has become. Following the best tradition of the Irish wake, however, authors and artists also sprinkled the dead book with some whiskey and took it up for a dance. Generations of twentieth-century writers have revisited Joyce’s literary monolith and refashioned it in their own image—from Sarraute to Cixous and Butor to Levé in France, from Brooke-Rose and Brophy to Sinclair and Moore in Britain, and from Gaddis and Gass to Danielewski and Goldsmith in the US.The twenty-first century has seen reality assimilate science fiction and the Image usurp the Word. In this era of superficiality and implosion, ULYSSES might stand as the long-unheard-of requiem to the lost art of literature. To celebrate this inimitable novel’s 100th birthday on February 2, 2022, Anti-Oedipus Press and Equus Press are on the hopeful lookout for voices in which the style, aesthetics, and ingenuity that empower Joyce’s masterwork still lingers.