False Positive - Softcover

Jaffe, Harold

3.8

20 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1573660981 ISBN 13: 9781573660983

Publisher: Fiction Collective 2, 2002

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Each of the fifteen fictions in False Positive originated as a nationally known newspaper story, which Harold Jaffe has "treated" to bring to its prosaic surface a maniacal subtext. The original stories cover the familiar American postmodern grotesquerie: high school mass murders; sexual molestations; rock star suicides; internet police; serial killers on the loose. Jaffe enters each published version, and through rearrangement, nuanced rewriting, and strategic interpellations, exposes the host text's latent madness. Thus re-armed, Jaffe's prosthetic creation is released into our culture to do its unsettling work. Jaffe's fictive "treatment" of these everyday nightmares is ambitious and startling. He embeds his found story in his own heightened versions, leaving the traces of the original text alongside his own, or insinuates the ghostly presence of journalese within his own deadpan lines. As The San Diego Union has said of Jaffe's earlier fiction, False Positive is more "exquisite chaos from the master word processor of our generation."

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About the Author:

Harold Jaffe is the author of seven fiction collections and three novels, including False Positive (forthcoming, 2001), Sex for the Millennium (1999), Othello Blues (1996), Straight Razor (1995), Eros Anti-Eros (1990), Madonna and Other Spectacles (1988),Beasts (1986), Dos Indios (1983), and Mourning Crazy Horse (1982). His fiction has appeared in numerous journals and anthologized in Pushcart Prize, Best American Stories, Best of American Humor, Storming the Reality Studio, American Made, Avant Pop: Fiction for a Daydreaming Nation, and After Yesterday's Crash. His novels and stories have been translated into several languages, including German, Japanese, Spanish, French, and Czech. He has been the recipient of two NEA's in fiction and two Fulbrights, to India and to the Czech Republic. Jaffe is editor-in-chief of Fiction International and Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at San Diego State University in San Diego, California

From Publishers Weekly:

"Ripped from the headlines" may be a promotional catchphrase in the world of prime-time television, but exploring the nooks and crannies of news and media remains a literary way of life for Jaffe (Beasts), the so-called "guerrilla writer" who provokes, titillates and amuses in this collection of 15 vignettes that he adapts from real-life news stories. The most startling by far is "Zealous Hysterectomies," an eerie foreshadowing of September 11, which describes the rise and spread of Islamic fundamentalism, the Taliban and Osama bin Laden during the civil war in Afghanistan and also incorporates some brief, cheeky musings on the potential sexual benefits of hysterectomies. Jaffe's normal modus operandi is an entertaining mixture of the ironic and the macabre, a vein he mines most effectively in "Severed Hand," the story of a man who cuts his hand off with a power saw, then sues his doctors for not being able to reattach it. Most of the pieces follow a similar track "Pizza Parlor" describes the attack of an ex-wife and her mother-in-law on the child molester she married, while "Faux" deals with the ramifications of duplicity as Jaffe explores what happens when cops use phony IDs to catch sex criminals on the Internet and HMOs use fake patients to test the services of hospitals they help manage. In this ingenious collection, Jaffe gets plenty of mileage from life's extensive menu of disturbed, deranged behaviors and the way the media covers the perpetrators.

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