Blasi, D: The Jiri Chronicles and Other Fictions

These audacious stories shine with artistic nuance and fearless emotional intensity. Tragic, lyrical, hilarious, and politically controversial, they exist in a world where fact is as strange as fiction, and fiction is often disguised as fact.

The Jiri Chronicles & Other Fictions is divided into three sections, each a unique literary experiment. In Snapshots: A Genealogy in Flight, Debra Di Blasi draws inspiration from real family photographs to creat a haunting portrait of successive generations of a fictionalized Midwest family. "Hyperfictions" features writing that is interactive and nonlinear, dissolving borders between poetry and prose, visual art and music.

At the work's comic center is an invention that transgresses the boundaries of fiction and fraud. Just who is Jiri Cech? A businessman, vampire, and artist from Czechoslovakia? A website? A hoax? An American con artist whose racism and sexism, although loathsome, only heighten his allure? Or something greater or smaller than the sum of these parts?

This astonishing collection challenges the stylistic and thematic boundaries of traditional literature, questioning what it means to be human--and awake--in the post-millenium.