Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Return to Circa '96

Return to Circa '96

Sawatzki, Bob

Paperback

Literary Fiction

Publisher Price: $35.00

ISBN10: 1884097065
ISBN13: 9781884097065
Publisher: Jef Books
Published: Jan 15 2015
Pages: 190
Weight: 1.00
Height: 0.40 Width: 8.50 Depth: 11.00
Language: English
The book's title, Return to Circa '96', caught my attention right off. Themes of memory, time travel, and so forth were evoked. Then the visual appeal was quite marked (my professional and personal interests tilt in favor of scripto-visual works). The data-base aesthetics (Lev Manovich) aspect of the work gave it a very contemporary Web 2.0 kind of technological relevance, which meshed well with the book's meta-fictional construction. These conceptual art-ish and surfictional elements lured me into the book. The library-as-a-framing-device, situating events within a repository of texts, hit a responsive chord given my own autodidactic / academic propensities. I felt at home in the text. The producer's mixtures of modalities of writing, a mulligan stew of different textualities, were attributes of the kinds of works I read and re-read most often. Finally, the book was funny. It not only gave that writerly jouissance touted by literary theorist Roland Barthes, but also the plaisir of a readerly text. In short, in opening Mr. Sawatzki's book, it was as if I'd found a long-lost friend. -- James R. Hugunin

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