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by Steve Katz (Author)
[Katz] reprises the pleasure of everything he has ever written, and yet it is utterly singular. No one who cares about America's literary and art scene in the sixties should fail to read it.--R. M. Berry, author of Frank
Employing the fine structure constant that has tantalized physicists for decades, celebrated novelist Steve Katz conjures his life story from 137 discreet, shuffled memories of art, travels, reflections, and confusions. Here are sculpture and teepees, Western mountains, Eastern pilgrimages and, throughout, artists' lives: Kathy Acker, Philip Glass, Vladimir Nabokov, Richard Serra, and a catalog of others Katz knows and knew.
Author Biography
Steve Katz is considered an important figure in the avant-garde or experimental fiction writing of 1960s and 70s for works such as The Exagggerations of Peter Prince (1968), Saw (1972), and Moving Parts (1977). His collection of stories, Creamy & Delicious (1970), was mentioned in Larry McCaffery's list of the 100 greatest books of the 20th century where it was called The most extreme and perfectly executed fictional work to emerge from the Pop Art scene of the late 60s. Katz has written 18 books in all, including fiction, poetry, a screenplay, and a miscellany, Kissssss (2007).
Katz was born in the Bronx, New York City in May 1935. He received his Bachelors degree at Cornell University and his Masters degree at the University of Oregon. He has taught at the University of Maryland Overseas (Italy), Cornell University, the University of Iowa, Brooklyn College, Queens College, City University of New York, and Notre Dame University. In 1978 he became the director of the creative writing program at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Katz has also worked as a miner, a dairy farmer, and a teacher of T'ai chi ch'uan. He received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1976 and 1981. Katz's longtime associations with avant-garde artists in contemporary music and visual arts, as well as writing, make him a unique figure in American arts scenes of the past half-century.
