Author of Wisdom's Maw distributes short story collection freely over the Internet NYC, New York, September 7, 2010 -- Todd Brendan Fahey, author of Wisdom's Maw (Far Gone Books, 1996), surrounding the CIA's LSD experiments known as Project MK-ULTRA, has opted to disperse his collection of short stories, Dogshit Park & other atrocities , freely over the Internet. "Satire hasn't been in vogue in literature...probably ever," cracks Fahey, in an interview with Mondo 2000 founder R. U. Sirius. "It is a cast of mind, and which mostly feels like a curse. Joseph Heller did it right with Catch-22 ; Vonnegut lived on it; William S. Burroughs was it. And of course, Hunter. And they're all gone." The collection--which includes interviews Fahey conducted with Ken Kesey and Timothy Leary, and a legally-challenged aborted fragment for New York cigar magazine Smoke was born of a troubled marriage, the strain of becoming a university English professor, despite intense stage-fright, and copious quantities of LSD, which, he admits, "had to that point fueled nearly all of my fiction and creative nonfiction." The core stories were constructed in four months, at the turn of 1993, as Fahey says, "in a white heat, basically smashed on acid." They center, as does all satire, on social discontentmarital dispute, workplace monotony, avarice and lust, and with a heavy emphasis on Dogshit Park: "A haven," as he tells it, "for winos and druggies, in the rich, white student ghetto of Isla Vista," on the fringes of affluent UC-Santa Barbara campus, where Fahey spent his first two years of university. Three of the stories involve the titular locale. Others morph fragments of the author's past: the introductory teaching stint at a backwoods college in Ogden, Utah; his rocky, and very public, tenure as a doctoral Teaching Fellow at University of Louisiana-Lafayette, and a special fixation with Amsterdam. The collection features story-specific illustrations by Rich Mackin, Marc Reusch and Dave Dawson, with whom Fahey collaborated in the mid-'90s while toiling for Boston's Lollipop magazine and reconnected via Facebook phenomena, each of whom have come into their own respective underground acclaim. Having run the rounds of the New York literary mafia and "the world of agents," Fahey says: "No way was 'a publisher' going to take this bunch. And I could have felled trees and spent $5k to get it done that way via self publishing, but why ?" Fahey sharpened his teeth within the graduate Professional Writing Program at USC, studying for two years under Hubert Selby, Jr. ( Last Exit to Brooklyn ) and further at University of Louisiana-Lafayette, where Pulitzer nominee Ernest J. Gaines tolerated his on-paper antics with bemusement. "He said they seemed about right for Penthouse ; I took it as a compliment," Fahey recalls. (Gaines offered back-jacket praise for Wisdom's Maw .) Todd Brendan Fahey writes because he must, acknowledging thus far few fiscal dividends. "Blake died broke and so did many others. But if it's in you," he says, "and if you're anything like me, it is going to have to come out." Dogshit Park & other atrocities can be found as another Far Gone Book at: http://www.dogshi
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"Acid Novelist" Casts Collection of Black Satire to 'Net Winds
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