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...

As in Harold Jaffe's two previous "docufiction" collections, False Positive and 15 Serial Killers, the author of Terror-Dot-Gov selects then "treats" his texts such that the reader is incapable of distinguishing between fact and fiction. That ambiguity permits Jaffe to cunningly tease out the contradictions and subtexts of official "news" or "information" and torque it into what it so often is fundamentally: jingoism, xenophobia and propaganda. Jaffe's subject in Terror-Dot-Gov is not the everywhere-represented "illicit" terrorism so much as "licit," institutionalized terrorism, and he...

Building on the mayhem generated by the controversial but critically acclaimed 15 Serial Killers, Jesus Coyote goes still further. Jaffe's "docufictional" novel based on the Manson murders proves that, like Manson's coyote totem, the myths around him continue to vibrate. In one sweeping panoramic arc, with the brutal murders at its center, Jaffe captures the perspective of Manson, his devotees, the prosecutors, the victims and their mourners-while exploding the sanctimony of institutionalized morality.

These 50-word stories are based on "found" texts from mainstream news sources and other public sites. Jaffe sculpts them to reveal their inner core, all niceties stripped away. Now the true motives, fears and sins of our age are on display for all who care to see. Amidst an internet-driven content boom, meaning has virtually disappeared. ANTI-TWITTER's extreme brevity demonstrates by example that brief need not = dumbed-down. Though the stories describe a wide arc: high and pop culture, intimate and public, sordid and exalted, all subjects are equally laid bare by Jaffe's incisive stratagems.

In this timely collection of essays and "quasi-essays," acclaimed novelist and critic Harold Jaffe explores the intricate vicissitudes of millennial culture. Gesturing, in a philosophical shorthand, toward a kind of pop Armageddon, Revolutionary Brain is at once thesis, allegory, and surreal comedy, demonstrating just how far we, and the natural world we have debased, have fallen. Obsessed with technology, we are incapable of reconstructing ourselves. By way of Jaffes elegant prose and perfect pitch, our collective disability is laid bare at the 11th hour. REVOLUTIONARY BRAIN is a powerful...