Pure Poetry

Pure Poetry realizes a traditional ideal for modern English literature in a contemporary way, in Richard Kostelanetz's continuing reworking of milestones in literary history. Richard Kostelanetz has been publishing radically alternative stories, mostly in literary magazines, for more than four decades. Among the many books and chapbooks collecting his fiction are: In the Beginning (1971), Short Fictions (1974), Numbers: Poems & Stories (1974), Openings & Closings (1975), Constructs (1975), Come Here (1975), One Night Stood (1977), Constructs Two (1978), Foresthortenings and Other Stories (1978), Tabula Rasa (1978), Inexistences (1978), Exhaustive Parallel Intervals (1979), More Short Fictions (1980), Reincarnations (1981), Epiphanies (1983), Constructs Three-Six (4 volumes, 1991), Flipping: A Constructivist Novel (1991), Fifty Constructivist Stories (1991), Intermix (1991), Two-Element Stories (2003), Minimal Fictions (1996), 3-Element Stories (1998), Seven Jewish Short Fictions (2007), Furtherest Fictions (2007, 2013), Micro Stories (2010), Thrice (2010), Epiphanies Complete (2011), Lovings (2011), Epiphanies I & II (2012), 1001 Enumerated Stories (2012), Openings (2012), Erotic Minimal Fictions (2010, 2012), GhoStories (2012), Visual Fictions (2012), Verbal Fictions (2012), Conceptual Fictions (2012), 1-99 (2013), CF 1 (2013), CF 2 (2013), Homophones: Stories (2013), Richard Kostelanetz's Loves & Lives (2013), The Works & Life of Kosty Richards: An American Career (2013), Him & Her (2013), Page Turners (2014), Monoepics (2014), With 6 Squares (2014), Of 4 & 5 Squares (2014), Lovings (2014), Unscience Fictions (2014), Checkmates: Eight Narratives (2015), To&Fro& (2015), Versos (2015), The Death and Redeath of Ivan Ilyitch (2015), Running Heads (2015), Narrative Pictures/Still Lifes (2015), Running Footers (2015), 100 Chapters: A Novel (2015), An Episodic Novel/A Condensed Novel (2015), Love: A Narrative (2015), Writing a Novel (2016), Epitaphs (2016), A Polyphonic Novel (2016), Writing Another Novel (2015), A-Z Four Novellas (2016), and Translovings (2016). As many of his recent titles explore the territories between literature and book-art, he has also produced fictions for extended surfaces (Contagion: A Novel, 2004); audiotape (Seductions, 1981; Acoustic Fictions, 1992); videotape (Video Fictions, 2004); and film (Epiphanies, 1981-1993). This work has been recognized in histories of American literature since the 1970s, most visibly in the Columbia History of American Literature (1989). Individual entries on his fiction have appeared in the encyclopedic Contemporary Novelists since the 1970s, while the entries on Kostelanetz in A Reader's Guide to 20th Century Writing (1995) and the Merriam Webster Encyclopedia of Literature (1995) have emphasized his fiction. (His name is one of a thousand living and dead in the first volume and one of ten thousand from all time in the second volume.) Kostelanetz has also edited three anthologies exclusively of fiction, Twelve from the Sixties (1967), Future's Fictions (1971), and Breakthrough Fictioneers (1973), in addition to several other collections including fiction along with other kinds of work. His fugitive fiction criticism was collected as The Old Fictions and the New (1987).
About the Author: Individual entries on Richard Kostelanetz's work in several fields appear in various editions of Readers Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers, Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature, Contemporary Poets, Contemporary Novelists, Postmodern Fiction, Webster's Dictionary of American Writers, The HarperCollins Reader's Encyclopedia of American Literature, Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, Directory of American Scholars, Who's Who in America, Who's Who in the World, Who's Who in American Art, NNDB.com, Wikipedia.com, and Britannica.com, among other distinguished directories. Otherwise, he survives in New York, where he was born, unemployed and thus overworked. For over thirty years his Epiphanies have appeared in literary magazines.