The Jiri Chronicles & Other Fictions [Paperback]

Debra Di Blasi (Author), Debra DiBlasi (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review

By far the most interesting thing she's done.... It's a huge step for Di Blasi, and a welcome one. ---Tim Feeney, Review of Contemporary Fiction

"Debra Di Blasi writes in a gray zone where literature, art and conceptual performance meet. Her prose reads like poetry or comes with scrapbook visuals. Her social comment channels Duchamp and his surreal cousins.... --The Kansas City Star

There are dozens of "why not?" moments in Jirí, and Di Blasi exploits them all for maximum effect. --Paul Constrant for The Stranger

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Fiction Collective 2; 1 edition (March 28, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1573661368
• ISBN-13: 978-1573661362
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,514,228 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Debra Di Blasi (www.debradiblasi.com) is founding publisher of Jaded Ibis Press and president of Jaded Ibis Productions (jadedibisproductions.com). She also curates mini-exhibitions of work by emerging artists, and frequently teaches and lectures on topics related to 21st Century narrative forms.

In addition to her publishing role, Debra is an award-winning multi-genre writer and artist whose books include The Jirí Chronicles & Other Fictions (FC2/University of Alabama Press); Drought & Say What You Like (New Directions; New York); Prayers of an Accidental Nature (Coffee House Press; Minneapolis), What the Body Requires (Jaded Ibis); and Skin of the Sun (forthcoming). She has been favorably reviewed in The New York Times Book Review, Publishers Weekly, Review of Contemporary Fiction, and in many other publications.

Awards include a James C. McCormick Fellowship in Fiction from the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, Thorpe Menn Book Award, Cinovation Screenwriting Award, and Diagram Innovative Fiction Award.

Her writing has been published in a many leading anthologies of innovative and experimental writing and has been adapted to film, radio, theatre, and audio CD in the U.S. and abroad. Her essays, art reviews and articles can be found in a variety of international, national and regional publications.

The short film based on her novella Drought was directed by Lisa Moncure and won a host of national and international awards, including being only six US films invited to the Universe Elle section of the 2000 Cannes International Film Festival. Her visual art has been exhibited at galleries and museums in the U.S. and virtually.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars From Horse-and-Buggy Days to Bush's America, August 17, 2007

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Real Reviews (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Jiri Chronicles & Other Fictions (Paperback)

As with much literature that thinks of the book as an art form rather than a product, it's hard to characterize Debra Di Blasi's The Jiri Chronicles. Though fiercely literary, and literate, on first sight the book appears to be a first cousin to The Onion, or The National Enquirer. Interspersed between smiling models in ads for Helliburton ("If you think you have to take responsibility for your actions, think again"), or Face It ("150 years of history and romance won't help you get laid") and others, are what used to be called short stories that make a reader wonder, Why isn't more lit like this? If it were, it wouldn't find itself increasingly becoming (at best) the stodgiest, and most conservative, art form, or (at worst) relegated to the irrelevant dust-heap of culture. Instead, it would find itself where the coolest of music and visual art resides: funny, with-it, funny, socially engaged, funny. Did I mention how funny this book is? But it's much more than funny: doing what fiction has traditionally done best, the stories within this collection are by turns moving, cuttingly intelligent, and ultimately profound. Unlike so much mainstream fiction today, they go beyond the trials and tribulations of what Don DeLillo once called `around-the-yard-and-in-the-house' fiction even if they might take as their starting point the memory-evoking, sepia photos in "Mrs. Conner and Her Six Children, 1883" or the farm boys and girls of "William Wesley Pickens, Sr. 1910", a series of one-page stories gathered as a section titled "Snapshots: A Genealogy in Flight." The opening section of a collection that reads as much like a novel as a hybrid story collection shows Di Blassi at her most poetic: an author who can evocatively capture the land and its people, as she has in previous works like Drought and Prayers of an Accidental Nature.

But readers quickly realize this book is more ambitious than the normal fiction of home-and-hearth, the second section being titled "Hyperfictions," and containing stories where Di Blasi begins to use the full range of talents she brings to the page: the lyricism of a poet, fused with the savviness of a visual artist, showing herself to be an author who is aware of the history of literature and her place in it today, creating works of narrative art that are in synch with today's political, artistic, and cultural moment, both in terms of their themes and form. The more straight-forward stories of the first section are juxtaposed with stories like "Ways a Father Dies" or "Haunted" where line breaks, visuals and other page architecture begins to creep into the narrative, bringing a level of associative logic that make these stories speak in ways to a readers who were brought up in the world they describe, a world not captured in sepia tones, as were the people of "Snapshots," but one where a series of images of trees fade, as in "Haunted", as the protagonist contemplates dying alone. By the last section of the book, "The Jiri Chronicles," we are firmly in the NOW. Here Di Blasi gives free range to her imagination (and reportage), creating fictions that are as fresh as many of the current events they draw on, mixing fake ads, sketches, photos--and importantly, the same intelligence and high degree of literary writing that runs through the book--to create narratives that both stand on their own, and contrast with stories in the earlier sections. In place of the hominess of the characters in "Snapshots", we have Jiri Cech, a vampiristic, cement contractor, poet wannabe, supporter of all things hyper commercial, including [...] implants, Republican talk radio, and endless war (good for business). The conclusion of the book is comprised of ads for Jiri Cech tee-shirts, CDs and other products.

The sum effect of reading this collection/novel is astonishing: as though one has just had a fast-forward tour though not only the last hundred years of the art of American fiction, but also the last hundred years of American culture. It may be the best answer out there to the question, "How did we get where we are from where we had been?" It should be required reading for anyone interested in that question, as well as the current state of fiction, and how writing can remain a relevant, perhaps the most relevant, art form in a multi-media age.