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BOOKS
The Magical Publishing Pen
by M.
Stefan Strozier
The printed
book (180 pages) is $14.95, the Kindle
version is $4.00.
The collected stories of M. Stefan Strozier vary widely in theme and yet the
protagonist is always a male of a certain age. As arranged her, the stories
represent a chronological arc of a man's life from boyhood to adulthood. Stylistically,
the stories show an arc too, as a story about a young man was written when the
author was a young man, and a story about an older man was written when the author
was older, for example. Magical Realism, framed stories, humor, satire, action,
different points-of-view, and crisp dialog pervade the stories. This collection
is a portrait of an artist as a young to mid-aged man.
Reviews (some spoilers ahead):
"A story about rejection
struck me as pure feeling – the whole thing, emotion inhabited
every sentence.
This book of stories is short and it reads fast.
I think it would be better read in as close to one sitting as possible
in order to keep the feel of the whole experience. The feel of
the stories ties them together.
The author of these stories wrote a book of poems
called Schizophrenia Poems- this gives an indication of the nature some
of the stories, though not all. And it's best exemplified I thought in the first
story, 'The Farm'. (Also by the way in 'The Tigress' - about a young man, recently
out of a mental hospital, making his own identity, and 'Happiness in New York
City' - an ironically titled story about a homeless man who hallucinates a visit
from god.) 'The Farm' is a wonderfully written piece on the life and mental aberrations
(including vivid hallucinations) of a young boy, who in a later story is diagnosed
a paranoid schizophrenic. I believe the book is autobiographical-ish, though
the main character in each story usually has a different name. The author is
also a playwright, and I thought the dialog flowed smoothly – clean and
natural.
I won't reveal anything further about plots of
stories. Except to mention that one, 'Seashore of Lake Michigan', is I believe
about an adolescent boy with mental problems testing a friendship. 'The Man and
His Wife' is right out of Kafka, succinctly and effectively written. There is
a long story about a sensitive man's reactions to the Gulf War (before, during
and after his going there). The grandfather of this man was himself in a war,
had shot an enemy soldier in half, and never stopped feeling remorse and regret
for it. At one point, in a car with his grandson, he cries and cannot stop for
10 minutes, then recovers and drives on. A story about rejection struck me as
pure feeling – the whole thing, emotion inhabited every sentence. I felt
it. Though there was nothing maudlin or melodramatic about it. There is a story
about a shipwreck, excitingly told, leaving two men alone, adrift on a raft – an
Irishman and an Englishman. The title story (probably not autobiographical!)
has a great ending. The story called 'Hollywood's Last Hurrah!' (ostensibly true)
started out reminding me of Capote's collection of essays on people he'd known,
then turned into Dostoyevsky's 'Notes From The Underground'!
I've mentioned something that struck me about several
of the stories. I liked this book very much, and recommend it.
– Joseph Hart,
writer.
"The stories have
strong currents of feeling through them and some contain a bitterness
that is hard to chew upon."
Tired of the anemic, navel-gazing, midlife crisis
stories that dominate so many literary journals these days? Well,
then you should read some of the crazy-laced, fevered, and volatile
stories that make up M. Stefan Strozier's first collection – The
Magical Publishing Pen.
The stories have strong currents
of feeling through them and some contain a bitterness that is
hard to chew upon. But these stories will be difficult to forget:
A man remembers his father's advice – "Always remember
that you've had Hollywood all of your life" – and
ends up briefly involved with an exotic wrestler; Hugh Hefner,
and a locker room scene that teeters on the brink of surrealism:
in 'The Tigress', the narrator, who had been diagnosed a paranoid
schizophrenic, restores an old tractor engine and in the process
restores himself; in 'The Man and His Wife' a beleaguered husband
watches his wife transform into a giant spider. No, these are
not stories for the squeamish; these are not stories for puritans.
But they are alive, and that’s what good readers deserve.
– Louis Phillips,
Author of The Woman Who Wrote King Lear and Other Stories
"... fast, efficient,
moving, attention-gripping."
A strangely exotic mix of topics and styles here. On one hand, it’s like
going into some small Michigan or Indiana or Ohio town restaurant and getting
the life stories of the oldsters sitting there eating their liver and onions
and hash browns, but on the other hand it's full of strange, exotic supernaturalist-mythological
material the like of which you’ve never seen before. The whole, though,
on skates, fast, efficient, moving, attention-gripping.
Like an hallucinogenic story called 'The Man and
His Wife.' Her at the kitchen table writing a letter, him sitting on the sofa
reading, and then suddenly: "... the man's wife turned into a giant, black
spider ... eight limbs instead of four ... the spider started jumping around
the room in a circle, ensnaring him with a web ... soon the webbing covered his
whole body and held him tight." (pp.98-99) Then the wife asks him to take
out the garbage before he goes to bed, and suddenly she's just a wife again.
Or not quite: As he's taking the garbage out she looks up at him: "He looked
back, nervously, and her eyes seemed a little more narrow than usual." (p.100)
War stories here, farm stories, a story about the devil vacationing in Las Vegas,
a Hollywood love-breakup story... lots of variety, all revolving around similar
elements: normality, hallucinatory hysterical edge-of-madness, and always a backdrop
of literary-film success off in the distance whispering "You never know
when." The whole book a basis for a score of films/plays, which is what
Strozier is really all about.
– Hugh Fox,
writer
"... beautifully
told"
I spent most of the day reading [the] collection of stories. It opens with
a panorama of the life and "culture" of adolescents, whose world
focusses of beer drinking, some curiosity about the opposite sex, time
wasting, and hardly a touch of intellectual curiosity, aesthetic refinement,
emotion, ideas and ideals. It all is covered with the dung of foul language,
which does not make it any more appetising. Very depressing, if true.
'Scarecrow Soldier' offers a horrific depiction
of the senselessness and horror of war, without entering into its political
foundations. This is a genre of literature which follows the shattering experiences
of soldiers. A prominent example is a German book published after World War I,
by Remarque, Im Westen Nichts Neues, which I read in Polish translation
in my early teens and which has left a deep impression ( or rather depression)
on me, as it did on the generation between the two world wars. It is not pleasant
reading – nor should it. It sounds true, and probably is based on [the
author's] own experience.
'The Stringer' is a very well written story, as
it presents an English and an Irish shipwrecked sailors, conversing on their
different judgments on their political conflict. The difference in the intellectual
temperament is finely conveyed. A happy ending is wisely (from the literary point
of view) avoided. The common humanity is sensibly, but not sentimentally, conveyed.
This is really a beautifully told story.
Alas, then we descend to Las Vegas and Hollywood,
and the world of the cultural waste-land of adolescence turned into a full-blown
degeneration.
– Mordecai Roshwald,
writer
About the Author:
M. Stefan Strozier lives in New York City. He is the founder and artistic director
of La Muse Venale Acting Troupe. His plays, 'Guns, Shackles & Winter Coats',
'The Whales', 'The Tragedy of Abraham Lincoln', and 'The Green Game', were
performed in lengthy runs, off-off and Off-Broadway, and in the Midtown International
Theatre Festival. Additionally, he has written 'Belzac December Night' (a one-act
play; the first of 8 plays about America), and 'Villa y Zapata La Revolucion'
(the first of 4 5-act plays about Mexican history; he is working on the first
play in the series now, called 'The Moctezuma!'). He has directed seven plays
and a two staged reading of a musical, and produced twenty-one plays. His novels,
short stories, poems, essays, plays, etc... are on his website: http://www.mstefanstrozier.org.
He has been published in literary journals (online and in print), magazines,
and newspapers. He is the founder, CEO, and publisher of World Audience Publishers,
and the editor-in-chief of audience Magazine.
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