For some 25 years, Harold Jaffe has been synonymous with confrontational innovative fiction with a subversive edge. This new volume collects the author's recent "creative nonfiction." But in Jaffe's hands, this term takes on a whole new meaning, blurring insight and innovation, moving widely and effortlessly from art and technology in America to global politics to travel in Asia to writing in wartime to gift-giving as a revolutionary act. Many of Jaffe's texts read like formally innovative narratives; others function like conceptual art, remaining in the mind long after. Everywhere evident is Jaffe's broad erudition, social commitment, and energized, elegant writing.

From "The Writer in Wartime," one of thirteen pieces collected in Beyond the Techno-Cave:

"You live in Des Moines, Iowa, and are a published novelist with a modest reputation based on your narratives about white middle-class domestic crises. You also serve in a National Guard military police unit, and your company is called up and sent to Iraq to function as MP's in Abu Ghraib Prison, west of Baghdad. There, you observe and strongly disapprove of the unlawful abuse and torture of the inmates, many of them innocent Iraqi teenagers snatched from the streets. Do you continue to write narrative still lifes or do you bracket your customary subject in order to bear witness, to broadcast as widely as possible the unlawful, immoral treatment in Abu Ghraib?     

"You are an 'Aryan' painter living in Berlin during the Reich. You have heard and read about the extermination camps. You have witnessed Nazis violently mistreat Jews and gypsies, homosexuals and the disabled. Appalled colleagues and friends -- most of them Aryans like you -- have left the country. You yourself are appalled at the Nazi practices. At the same time, you continue to sell your pictures -- oil and watercolor renditions of rustic woodland scenes -- and make a respectable living in Germany, so you choose not to leave the country, at least physically. Mentally, you have separated yourself from the ongoing atrocities. You have, in Hannah Arendt's words, embarked on an inner emigration, and in keeping with this 'emigration' your art does not in any way reflect the Nazi virulence."

Some Praise for Jaffe's previous work:

15 Serial Killers:
"Harold Jaffe explodes the very social, political, and narrative structures supporting capitalist culture's illusory edifices, further cementing his reputation as one of our finest literary terrorists/freedom fighters." - Paradoxa

Othello Blues:
"With multi-layered dialogue and descriptions as clipped and terse as stage directions, Jaffe uses his science fictional setting to hold a satirist's funhouse mirror to our own contemporary world, showing us the rich grown richer, the poor poorer, and the powerful even more indifferent to the misery around them. It is a world to which the blues is the all too appropriate response." - Rain Taxi Review of Books

Straight Razor:
"Jaffe's best book to date. Which is saying a great deal. Incisive, vibrant, brilliant, even prophetic." - Washington Post

"A hip, bleak, postmodern masterpiece." - San Francisco Chronicle

Mourning Crazy Horse:
"Harold Jaffe is to fiction what Merce Cunningham is to dance, what John Cage is to verbal/musical instrumentation." - Newsday

Also of Interest:

Jaffe/Anti-Jaffe

Harold Jaffe Wikipedia entry

Fiction International