Not-So Stories

Edited by Miles Champion, NOT-SO STORIES collects four decades of short story collaborations by Clark Coolidge and the late Larry Fagin, with accompanying drawings by Glen Baxter.NOT-SO STORIES collects the bulk of Clark Coolidge and Larry Fagin's collaborative prose made over some forty years, along with a selection of the drawings Glen Baxter produced with the stories in mind, also over a roughly forty-year period, from the late 1970s to 2019. The twelve stories were collaboratively found rather than written, using a soft version of the three-column newspaper cut-up technique William S. Burroughs began experimenting with in early 1964. Taking New Yorker-style magazine fiction (typeset in three columns) as source material, and looking for narrative connections between columns rather than reading horizontally across them, Coolidge and Fagin reorganize their source texts into Picassoid objects that jut out from reality at thoroughly odd yet delightful angles (think of Alice, hopped up on resurrectine, exploring The Palace at 4 a.m.). The earliest piece, What Ever Happened to Agnes Mason?, dates from spring 1969, and the most recent, The Two Miracles, from summer 2011. Two of the collaborations were issued privately by Fagin: Third Down and God to Go (1991) and Guidelines without Realizing (2000); the other stories, and Baxter's drawings, are published here for the first time. Not-So Stories exhales a carbon dioxide of English nonsense over the city of second-generation New York School literary collaboration, and will surely appeal to anyone who has ever enjoyed a few moments in the company of Tonto Lavoris or Schnozz Lombardi. Attractive paperback with full-color Baxter blast on the front and highly covetable Ed Ruscha blurb on the back. The ideal stocking stuffer, while stocks last.