In this Book
- The Possibility of Music
- Book
- 2010
- Published by: The University of Alabama Press
The Possibility of Music is an imaginative reconstruction of America in the early 21st century. What would our post-9/11 society look like if it were viewed through a series of funhouse mirrors?
Each of Stephen-Paul Martin’s stories is a response to this question, a prose exploration that redefines what it means to write fiction in a world in which the Sistein Chapel has become the Mall of America. Nightmarish at times, playfully amusing at others, Martin’s prose is relentlessly inventive and challenging, relocating the experimental tradition of Joyce, Kafka, Borges, and Marquez in a contemporary context in which intelligent communication has become both impossible and increasingly necessary.
"I’d always told myself that if I ever wrote my own music," the narrator of one story says, "every composition would become its own distinct struggle with aesthetic questions that emerged as the process unfolded." In good part, that’s what animates The Possibility of Music, a book in which John Coltrane’s "Love Supreme" moves through characters and stories like a soundtrack.
Table of Contents
- Title Page, Copyright Page
- pp. 2-11
- Impossible
- pp. 13-32
- The Possibility of Music
- pp. 33-54
- A New Kind of Happiness
- pp. 55-85
- Worlds Converging
- pp. 87-110
- Ecstatic Ellipsis
- pp. 111-135
- Collapsing into a Story
- pp. 137-159
Additional Information
Copyright
2007