My biography of the Hollywood director William Wyler, A Talent for Trouble, is available as an ebook at Amazon and an ebook on iTunes at the Apple store. Putnam published it in hardcover, and Da Capo Press published it in paperback.
Several other books, include a collection of theater criticism, Second Nights (Vol.1) and (Vol. 2), as well as The Z Collection: Portraits & Sketches, published by Blue Wind Press in an American edition and by Moloko Print in a European edition. (Rest assured the title of the book, first published in 2015 by AC Books, has nothing to do with the letter “Z” symbolizing support for rasPUTIN’s criminal war against Ukraine.)
— David Erdos, literary critic, MÜ Magazine (London)
European edition of The Z Collection
“Once, a mere blink in the eye of eternity but actually several generations ago, literary essays were considered a high art form. Not the kind that appear today in the New York Review of Books continually reinforcing the old in-joke “Review of Each Other’s Books,” or writings in pursuit of academic self-advancement, but something like free spirits writing intelligently about fellow free spirits.
“Jan Herman is that kind of essayist, with a biography to match. A cultural writer for newspapers in the era when millions of readers looked to serious commentary there, a contributor to literary journals, and an avant-gardist who worked everywhere from City Lights Books in San Francisco to Something Else Press in Vermont, he continues onward these days into his seventies at ArtsJournal. Formats change, the editorial eye remains.” — Paul Buhle, Rain Taxi
Available in paperback.
Recently I’ve written a cycle of “deformed sonnets.” You can read a collection of them in All That Would Ever After Not Be Said.
Some of the poems have also been published by Peter Engstler Verlag in a bi-lingual English-German edition titled FOURTEEN: Deformed Sonnets. (The German translations are by Gregor Pott.) Other poems in the cycle have been published in The Way the Lines Break, and in handmade limited editions by Cold Turkey Press. Here is Malcolm RItchie’s review of All That Would Ever After Not Be Said.
Moloko Print has published a bilingual edition of Your Obituary Is Waiting, containing 42 deformed sonnets.”The German translations are by Gregor Pott. On the cover is one of Norman O. Mustill’s “flypaper collages” from the book.
This message came from Charles Plymell:
And Jay Jeff Jones posted this review:
New from Moloko:
Purchase for $12 plus postage by sending an email to Straight Up.
Moloko has also published an enhanced facsimile edition of my old project Brion Gysin Let the Mice In, and in case anyone is interested, Collateral Damage: The Daily History of a Blog, traces blogposts of mine from more than a decade ago with a foreword by William Osborne. “If there is a single ethos that defines this collection of blog entries,” he writes, “it is that the arts do not exist in a vacuum, that culture is holistically connected to every aspect of society. … This blog captured the American cultural zeitgeist in the aftermath of 9/11. Written in Manhattan during a 14-month period between May 2002 and July 2003, it provided witty, detailed, atmospheric snapshots of a wide cross-section of the arts, media, and politics during a pivotal time in U.S. history, attracting millions of readers as the most popular blog by far during the early years of MSNBC.com.”
I am also the co-author of the experimental fiction Cut Up or Shut Up, a collaboration with Carl Weissner and Jurgen Ploog (with a “tickertape” intro by William S. Burroughs), and produced The Something Else Yearbook, an anthology of the arts, as editor.
