Andrea Scrima
ANDREA SCRIMA is the author of A Lesser Day (Spuyten Duyvil); the German edition was published by Literaturverlag Droschl in February 2018. An excerpt from a work-in-progress titled “all about love, nearly” was just published in the anthology Strange Attractors (University of Massachusetts Press). Scrima is the recipient of a writer’s fellowship from the Berlin Senate for Cultural Affairs and writes a monthly column for 3QuarksDaily. She is contributing editor to the online literary magazine Statorec.
In Conversation
BLAZING SUNBURSTS AND HOWLING MONKEYS: David Winner with Andrea Scrima
By Andrea ScrimaDavid Winner’s debut novel The Cannibal of Guadalajara, winner of the 2009 Gival Press Novel Award, is a powerful tale of an unlikely ménage-à-trois between Alfred (caught in the stranglehold of a mid-life crisis), his ex-wife Margaret, and a disturbed young man from Brooklyn.
The Political Eisenberg
By Andrea ScrimaDeborah Eisenberg’s stories spin taut, glistening webs between people and places that resonate at mesmerizing frequencies; they come as close to what can only be called reality as literature, at its best, can do.
From Whatever Was Left of Their Authentic Selves
By Andrea ScrimaA secluded island; a reality TV show. Seven long weeks and 10 contestants determined to do whatever it takes to prevail. Each blink of an eye, the subtlest gesture is recorded on countless cameras; in post-production, the footage is instantaneously cross-referenced to a dizzying array of digitally catalogued parameters and edited or enhanced according to a storyline-in-progress.
FICTION
The Thing About Harry
By Andrea Scrima
Harry Quirk, failed poet and middle-aged father to a lesbian, dumpster-diving freegan and a weak-willed son currently in the clutches of a pseudo-religious cult, has been thrown out of his home by his wife Luz, who suspects him of having a long-term affair with his best friend Marion.
In Conversation
Against a narcotic culture whose primary desire is stupefaction
Andrea Scrima talks to Rainer J. Hanshe, founder of Contra Mundum Press
Contra Mundum Press, founded in New York in late 2011, is an unusual new press with a distinctive list of publications to date. It debuted with a new translation by Stuart Kendall of the ancient epic Gilgamesh, which unites recent scholarship and a spare poetic sensibility to capture the consciousness of the archaic mind in the early days of our civilization.
In Conversation
Parataxis and Ponzi Schemes
MARGARITA MEKLINA and SNEŽANA ŽABIC with Andrea Scrima
Wreckage of Reason II: Back to the Drawing Board is an anthology of contemporary experimental women’s writing. The anthology, as Leora Skolkin-Smith has written, “stands on its literary merits alone, but it also elicits questions that point far beyond its own physical presence in the publishing arena—questions primarily to do with the threatened future of experimental and literary writing itself, with the questionable health and well-being of our current literary culture and its openness or lack thereof to work that isn’t consumerist in intent.”
In Conversation
Duanwad Pimwana and Mui Poopoksakul with Andrea Scrima
A young man on vacation is intensely preoccupied with the stirrings of his lust: why does a particular village woman arouse him, what is it exactly about her?
Amazon in Exile
By Andrea ScrimaScrew magazine once wrote that “Lynda Schor writes about sex as matter-of-factly as a harried housewife trying to make food stamps stretch at the local A&P.” It’s an ingenious strategy.
In Conversation
MOTHER TONGUE
LEORA SKOLKIN-SMITH with Andrea Scrima
It’s nearly impossible to imagine from today’s perspective of heavily guarded checkpoints and border controls and ugly, towering walls, but Israel was a very different world in the mid-1960s, when 14-year-old Liana Bialik and her sister accompany their mother Ada to her native Jerusalem to take part in “The Ceremony of the Graves.”
When Everything Stinks of Decay
By Andrea ScrimaWhen Thomas Bernhard’s Heldenplatz (Heroes’ Square) premiered in 1988, self-appointed defenders of Austria’s noble heritage unloaded a truckload of horseshit in front of the steps to the Burgtheater in Vienna.
Kafka’s Closest Twin Brother
By Andrea ScrimaRobert Walser’s legendary novella Der Spaziergang (The Walk), the first work of his to appear in English and the only one to be translated during his lifetime, is now available in the revised version he published three years after the original edition of 1917.
FICTION
A Complete and Lucid Whole
By Andrea Scrima
The renowned Polish writer, translator, and historian Marek Bieńczyk is a subtle thinker who persistently probes the ineffable and revelatory in human perception and experience. Transparency, his second book to be published in English after Tworki (Northwestern University Press, 2008), is a blend of essay, cultural criticism, and metaphysical fiction.
On the Impossibility of Teaching Writing: Rainald Goetz
By Andrea ScrimaGiven the author’s fame and the controversy surrounding his work, it was clear that his lecture would inevitably be received both as a diagnosis of the methods by which literature is currently taught in German universities and as a statement on the predicament of the written word today.
