literary non-fiction

I’m sad to report that my memoir, which won Memoir Magazine’s Grand Prize, is going out of print. Those readers who always wished to pick one up but kept putting it off should still be able to buy a copy over the coming week or two. If you have not heard of this title, you can find information about it on my Publications page. The book is currently available anywhere books are sold, but will more than likely require a personal order.

While this is sad news, it’s just the way of publishing. Thank you to all the readers who have supported my work over the years.

Between the years of 1996-1999, Gint Aras lived a hapless bohemian’s life in Linz, Austria. Decades later, a random conversation with a Polish immigrant in a Chicago coffeehouse provokes a question: why didn’t Aras ever visit Mauthausen, or any of the other holocaust sites close to his former home? The answer compels him to visit the concentration camp in the winter of 2017, bringing with him the baggage of a childhood shaped by his family of Lithuanian WWII refugees. The result is this meditative inquiry, at once lyrical and piercing, on the nature of ethnic identity, the constructs of race and nation, and the lasting consequences of collective trauma.

There’s always a special place in a writer’s heart for the first editor who reaches out to him with the inquiry, “I’m wondering if you’d like to write something for me.” In my case that man is Jim Lopez, editor of Antique Children. If you’ve never read Antique Children, you’re simply missing out on a truly unique literary magazine, exceptionally compelling and engaging. Jim’s full length book, Abstracts of an American Pageant, is one of those works of art that straddles the line between the depraved and the sublime, often pointing out that depravity is actually sublime while, to the right kind of eyes, the sublime is depraved.

I’d tell you something more about Jim’s work, but I’m afraid Andrei Codrescu cannot be topped:

Jim Lopez is a philosopher/writer who is inventing an extraordinary form of politically radical literary journalism. Violent urbanism and eerily psycho suburban offshoots vein his rich, vernacular prose. Jim Lopez is hacking his own language out of everything at hand, including the work of Friedrich Nietzche, fresh graffiti in a derelict Los Angeles, and kinky sex. Visual, ethnically explosive and unsentimental, Lopez is also fun to read, like Kathy Acker, like an extreme porn mag in history class. -Andrei Codrescu

You should watch this bit of guerrilla filmmaking in his honor:

Liquid Ink

The official website of Gint Aras, Finalist 2016 CWA Book Award

Tag Archives: literary non-fiction

Relief by Execution going out of print!

Jim Lopez: “Hacking his own language out of everything at hand…”