The Jiri Chronicles and Other Fictions

by Debra Di Blasi

Overview

These audacious stories shine with artistic nuance and fearless emotional intensity. Tragic, lyrical, hilarious, and politically controversial, they exist in a world where fact is as strange as fiction, and fiction is often disguised as fact.

The Jiri Chronicles & Other Fictions is divided into three sections, each a unique literary experiment. In Snapshots: A Genealogy in Flight, Debra Di Blasi draws inspiration from real family photographs to creat a haunting portrait of successive generations of a fictionalized Midwest family. "Hyperfictions" features writing that is interactive and nonlinear, dissolving borders between poetry and prose, visual art and music.

At the work's comic center is an invention that transgresses the boundaries of fiction and fraud. Just who is Jiri Cech? A businessman, vampire, and artist from Czechoslovakia? A website? A hoax? An American con artist whose racism and sexism, although loathsome, only heighten his allure? Or something greater or smaller than the sum of these parts?

This astonishing collection challenges the stylistic and thematic boundaries of traditional literature, questioning what it means to be human—and awake—in the post-millenium.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781573661362
Publisher:	University of Alabama Press
Publication date:	03/11/2007
Edition description:	First Edition, First Edition
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Debra Di Blasi, recipient of many writing awards, including the James C. McCormick Fellowship in Fiction from the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, the Thorpe Menn Book Award, and the Eyster Prize in Fiction. She is the author of Drought & Say What you Like, Prayers of an Accidental Nature, and Ugly Town. An accomplished screenwriter, she is also the president of Jaded Ibis Productions, Inc., a transmedia corporation.

 

 

Table of Contents

Snapshots: A Genealogy in Flight     11
Mrs. Conner and Her Six Children, 1883     13
William Wesley Pickens, Sr., 1910     15
Charles Elliot Pickens, 1940     17
Family Reunion, 1941     19
William Wesley Pickens, Jr., 1942     21
Donald Eugene Pickens, 1943     23
Devon D. Pickens, 1957     25
Hyperfictions     27
Ways a Father Dies     29
Sister Sister Sister Sister     31
Seed     37
Long After Winter: Galesburg, Illinois     39
Sparrows     41
The Last Mare     47
Mannequins: Sketches of Marriage     49
Exiles     51
Blue     55
Anonymous Children of Martin Luther...     59
Fist     65
Haunted     69
The Jiri Chronicles     81
The real Jiri Cech     83
Ad Fiction: Face It     85
Czechoslovakian Rhapsody Sung to the Accompaniment of Piano     87
Ad Fiction: Life Is Scary     107
Glauke's Gown     109
Ad Fiction: Think Again     129
Jiri Cech's Cuba Deposition     131
Oops. Sorry     133
Ad Fiction: Oh No     159
In Case You Haven't Noticed I'm Not Wearing Any Clothes     161
Ad Fiction: Orgasm     179
Machine Ghosts     181
Ad Fiction: Forget Botox     211
The real Jiri Cech Capitalist Consumer Products     213