The Idea Mine provides on overview to the metafictional worlds created by Paul JJ Payack.
Over his career as a writer, Payack has created hundreds of 'metafictions,' in the various forms of novella, short stories, 'polyplays,' essays, and 'collage narratives'.These have been published in some dozen collections and in hundreds of reveiws and anthologies around the world, including The Paris Review, New Letters, Creative Computing, and Boulevard. At the same time, Payack has served as a senior executive for some of the world's leading high technology companies.
According to Sylvia Berkman, "What continues to even more forcefully distinguish Paul Payack's later work is the nature of the creative intelligence from which it stems. This is an intelligence cool yet engaged, compose, witty, immensely concerned with the broad pivotol elements of the human experience".
Many of the works collected in this Idea Mine have been published insuch places as The Paris Review, Creative Computing, and the GnosisAnthology (English and Russian), while the collages have appeared insuch varied outlets as New Letters, Boulevard, and Asimov’s ScienceFiction. (For years Payack belonged to the Science Fiction Writers of America, but he does not classify himself as a science fiction writer.)
He actually calls this Idea Mine, or master oeuvre, Metafiction. Of course, there are logical groupings within Metafiction and a number of these have been published in various guises.In this Idea Mine readers can find exerpts of such works as:
The Book of Hours (An End to History, A Death to Consciousness): A wordless novel in seventy-six collages, which examines the endemic and, apparently, inherent conflicts in the male / female relationship.
The Divine Comedy: A Post-Modern Commentary: A critique of Dante Aligheri’s thirteenth century epic poem in twenty-six collages.
Santa and the Ho-Ho-Ho Zone by the Brothers Payack: A Post-Modern Christmas tale about the manner in which the children of the world get together to save the Earth (andChristmas!) from the environmental disaster resulting from the Hole in the Ozone. (Illustrated with Thomas Nast-type collages.)
Children of the Mind: Recounts the tale of a society in which thought is rationed, the imagination is viewed as a disease, and dreaming is considered a subversive activity.
The Land of Orth: An encyclopedia-style collection describing this hitherto unknown civilization. The story started as a single tale describing the phenomenon of psychological boundaries, where a boundary exists only because the subjects perceive it to exist. In the original tale the boundary was the Tall Walls, which were thought to be scores of kilometers high and thousands long. The tale is told from the perspective of the one who first postulatesthat the Tall Walls, upon which the entire civilization has based its society, culture, and belief system have, in fact, never existed.
Worlds to Shatter: A full-length classically styled dramatic work in nine “episodes”frequently compared in the style and content to Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.
Of course, this Idea Mine: A Brief Note on Metafiction does not contain Payack's entire oeuvre (hence the name); however, what is does provide is a glimpse into his work as a whole and, hopefully, examples that demonstrate both its nature and scope.
The Idea Mine can be purchased through, Borders, Barnes & Nobles, Amazom.com, and leading bookshops everywhere.
May I offer you a Round the World Cruise of a lifetime for the price of a novel?
Not only do the seas roll on but two romances,a death at sea, uncovered past lives, history uncovered in Brazil, caves in Australia, poetry in Senegal, the Lux Mundi
Part Three in the Mu Series - Sarah Thompson reluctantly abandons her desperate search for her soul mate on Maui and returns to her Montana hometown. Her brother has had a terrible accident...
This is the trade paperback edition of the mythopoeic paranormal novel recounting the attempts of one Danny Blue and his friends to come to terms with a series of unusual events in his life. A Kindle eBook edition is also available.
Share
Save
