James Chapman (author)
Excerpted in many print and online magazines, his work has won a Notable Stories in StorySouth's Million Writers Award, and been nominated four times for the Pushcart Prize.In his first novel, Our Plague (A Film from New York) (1993), the protagonist is an underground filmmaker alienated from his own body, disgusted by his own careerism, and awash in apocalyptic visions.The story in the brief The Walls Collide as You Expand, Dwarf Maple (1993) seems almost desiccated: a young woman grows up, meets a man on a train, and lives with him in a city.Stet (2006), Chapman's most ambitious book to date, takes the form of a bitter "Russian novel" about an ecstatic and weirdly oblivious Soviet filmmaker and painter, who ends up in prison camp as punishment for his private and antisocial tendencies.Degenerescence (2009) appears as a kind of endpoint of this alienated phase, where the author has finally turned away from the last of his own recognizable mannerisms, in favor of pseudo-ancient repetitive incantation about how the invention of narrative story causes the destruction of the hymn foundation of the world: what might be called a home-made Sumerian myth.