Sign-In
Cart
The Voice in the Closet
Paperback
ISBN13: 9781940853499
Publisher: Calamari Press
Published: May 25 2025
Pages: 56
Weight: 0.12
Height: 0.13 Width: 5.00 Depth: 7.00
Language: English
On a July morning in 1942, Raymond Federman's childhood ended, as his parents and two sisters were arrested by collaborationist French police and sent to their deaths at Auschwitz, with Raymond alone evading capture, surviving because his mother pushed him into an upstairs closet. The Voice in the Closet is Federman's most important book, the place where this author of more than a dozen other works of fiction addresses himself to the story at the core of all his work, putting the author in dialogue with the child he was that day, who protests, no I cannot resign myself to being the inventory of his miscalculations I am not ready for my summation nor do I wish to participate any longer willy nilly in the fiasco of his fabrication failed account of my survival abandoned in the dark with nothing but my own excrement to play with now neatly packaged on the roof to become the symbol of my origin in the wordshit of his fabulation...
RAYMOND FEDERMAN (1928-2009) were many persons: Holocaust survivor and WWII orphan, farm worker, paratrooper in the US Army, Korean War veteran, interpreter in Tokyo, sporting ace (swimming, tennis, golf), jazz musician, black marketeer, gambler, bon vivant, inventor of surfiction, bilingual author (novels, poems, short fiction, plays), translator, teacher, renowned Samuel Beckett scholar, Distinguished Professor (French, English, Comparative Literature, Creative Writing), husband, and father.
Federman was born in Paris, France, in 1928. When he was fourteen years old, his parents and two sisters were arrested during the 1942 roundup by the Nazis and sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp for extermination. In different versions, and both in English and in French, Federman again and again told various parts of the life story of a man called Federman, Namredef, Moinous, Featherman, Hombre de la Pluma, and on and on, trying to decipher the gesture of his mother that saved his life. He received the American Book Award, the Frances Steloff Prize for Experimental Fiction, and his books have been translated into 14 languages.
Federman is inarguably one of the most significant vanguard writers of the second half of the twentieth century and first years of the twenty-first.-Lance Olsen, author of Always Crashing in the Same Car
Remember one thing as you read this book. I do not write to make the reader comfortable. Federman writes texts that impose a state of loss that discomforts, unsettles the reader's historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of their tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis their relation with language.-Raymond Federman, quoted in the Introduction to Shhh: The Story of a Childhood
In Federman's early novels [inclusive of The Voice in the Closet] there are definitely two closets, and both of the protagonist's identities (Jewish and queer) are by turns exposed and decoded.-Natalie Camerlynck, Raymond Federman and Samuel Beckett: Voices in the Closet
Originally published in 1979 by Coda Press, reissued by Starcherone Books in 2001. This 2025 edition features a new introduction by author and Starcherone Books founder Ted Pelton.
Also from
Federman, Raymond
Take It or Leave It: An Exaggerated Second-Hand Tale to Be Read Aloud Either Standing or Sitting
Federman, Raymond
Paperback
Also in
Literary Figures
Up from the Depths: Herman Melville, Lewis Mumford, and Rediscovery in Dark Times
Sachs, Aaron
Hardcover
Hidden Hemingway: Inside the Ernest Hemingway Archives of Oak Park
Vetch, Aaron
Cirino, Mark
Elder
Hardcover
Go Deep and Take Plenty of Root: A Prairie-Norwegian Father, Rebellion in Minneapolis, Basement Zen, Growing Up, Growing Tender
Storlie, Erik Fraser
Paperback
Darkness Becomes Bright: On the Brief Life and Immortal Art of Edgar Allan Poe
Ogden, Emily
Hardcover
Travels with Charley in Search of America: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
Steinbeck, John
Paperback
The Agatha Christie Cure: What Reading the Queen of Crime Taught Me about Life
Rentzenbrink, Cathy
Hardcover
Plot Twist: Life, Craft, and the Messy First Draft: A Memoir on Writing (Large Print Edition)
Coben, Harlan
Paperback
Jane Austen's Bookshelf: A Rare Book Collector's Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend
Romney, Rebecca
Paperback
Miss Greene's Secret: Based on the True Story of the Black Librarian Who Shaped the Morgan Library
Antona, Nicolas
Hardcover
Eleven Days: The Fascinating True Account of Agatha Christie's Mysterious Disappearance
Thompson, Laura
Hardcover
The Village on the Edge of the World: Writing and Surviving in Ceausescu's Romania
Müller, Herta
Hardcover
The Lightning-Bug and the Lightning: Debunking the Myths of Mark Twain, in His Own Words
Dawidziak, Mark
Hardcover
Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare's Greatest Rival
Greenblatt, Stephen
Hardcover
Three by Annie Dillard: The Writing Life, an American Childhood, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Dillard, Annie
Paperback
Somewhere, a Boy and a Bear: A. A. Milne and the Creation of Winnie-The-Pooh
Brandreth, Gyles
Hardcover
The War for Middle-Earth: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm, 1933-1945
Loconte, Joseph
Hardcover
The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary
Winchester, Simon
Paperback
String Theory: David Foster Wallace on Tennis: A Library of America Special Publication
Wallace, David Foster
Hardcover
The Apostle of Tennessee: The Indefatigable Life and Ministry of Father Aloysius Orengo
Pagetta, Joe
Paperback
Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare's Greatest Rival
Greenblatt, Stephen
Paperback
The Making of Middle-Earth: The Worlds of Tolkien and the Lord of the Rings
Snyder, Christopher A.
Hardcover
Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway's Masterpiece the Sun Also Rises
Blume, Lesley M. M.
Paperback
From Typewriter to Takeoff: The Life of Journalist and Aviatrix Harriet Quimby
Tyler, Norman
Paperback
Henry and June: From a Journal of Love: The Unexpurgated Diary (1931-1932) of Anais Nin
Nin, Anaïs
Paperback
Mon Cher Amour: The Love Letters of Albert Camus and Maria Casares, 1944-1959
Camus, Albert
Hardcover