Donald Breckenridge


YOU ARE HERE
$16

YOU ARE HERE

In a New York City where time is chopped up like salad and people finish each others' sentences, a dozen characters have love affairs and take parts in a one-act play in the summer of 2001, and the spring, summer, and fall of 2004.

YOU ARE HERE is part Fassbinder anti-theatre, part cheap heartbreak à la Brenda Starr, part intertextual hall of mirrors. Donald Breckenridge's stunning prose spins into life a world of ideas and art — that nevertheless can come to a dead halt in a heartbeat.



"With YOU ARE HERE Donald Breckenridge presents a brilliant and transgressive work that re-thinks the backward glance from disaster in such a way that shows how slippery perception and memory can be. YOU ARE HERE is a masterful sleight of hand, a novel to be read and re-read many times."
- Susan Daitch

"Breckenridge's amazing novel is a record of interruptions and distractions, a kaleidoscope of details and snippets of conversations, the hum of being alive in the 21st century, a catalog of everything and nothing. His characters are all the people we pass on the street and fall in love with for an instant. Reading YOU ARE HERE is like listening to competitive radios on the beach — the music of the immediate present — wistful, insistent, dreamlike, totally real."
- Lewis Warsh

"I love the way Donald Breckenridge has the speaking (of people in YOU ARE HERE) follow or be ahead of the person, moving, say, as another person's moving speaking, so phrases are shared by both in tandem with other people moving through from the side and out the other side of a scene outdoors while the writer is nearby inside a building writing that same instant happening then. We rush ahead, in his "beauty," which is people opening while oblique in the outdoors that simultaneously is equally active. One such passage noting in passing police officers' "supervision" suggests the sense of his text: ordinary events in being exchanges have super vision."
- Leslie Scalapino



Contact: Ted Pelton, Editor, Starcherone Books, P.O. Box 303, Buffalo, NY 14201
Phone: 716-885-2726. Fax: 716-884-0291. E-mail: ted@starcherone.com
PUBLICATION DATE: October 1, 2009
PRICE: $16.00; 152 pp
ISBN: 978-0-9788811-8-4
PRINT RUN: 1000
BOOK TOUR: TBA


photo by Johannah Rodgers

Donald Breckenridge is the author of more than a dozen plays as well as the novella Rockaway Wherein (Red Dust, 1998), and the novel 6/2/95 (Spuyten Duyvil, 2002). His novel YOU ARE HERE is out this May from Starcherone Books and his novel Arabesques for Sauquoit is forthcoming from Autonomedia this fall. In addition he is the Fiction Editor of The Brooklyn Rail, co-editor of the Intranslation Website, Editor of The Brooklyn Rail Fiction Anthology (Hanging Loose Press, 2006) and for many years he hosted the popular Off The Rail reading series at the Central Branch of the Brooklyn Public Library.