A Fictional History of the United States (With Huge Chunks Missing)
Issue #29
By Kate Rockwood
Published: September 1st, 2006 | 12:00am
A Fictional History of the United States (With Huge Chunks Missing)
Edited by T Cooper and Adam Mansbach
(Akashic Books, $15.95, 207 pages)
Remember that a-ha! moment in school when you realized that history isn’t as tidy and boring as the textbooks would have you believe? A Fictional History of the United States lets you experience that moment all over again, with a distinct, varied collection of work by 17 authors — such as Neal Pollack, Sarah Schulman, and Kate Bornstein — who present “fictional histories” in forms ranging from political cartoons to absurdist fiction to interview.
Organized in rough chronology, the book opens with Paul La Farge’s “The Discovery of America” and closes with Daniel Alarcon’s “The Anodyne Dreams of Various Imbeciles,” a story set in 2007 in which an unnamed President is shot (at his ranch, no less — sound like anyone we know?) in the first sentence. The broad timeline makes for a wide spectrum of topics to be explored. “April 9, 1924” by Amy Bloom is a standout tale of a Jewish Russian immigrant finding her footing as a seamstress in 1920s America, while in “West,” Benjamin Weissman includes a fascinating passage of one pioneer preparing the body of a slaughtered fellow traveler, aptly named Gore, for a cannibalistic dinner, only to have the man reappear later that evening, after passing through the bowels of his homicidal companions.
Rarely does a collection showcase such disparate work, but here the improvisational cacophony successfully unlocks history from the flat, linear narrative form it has traditionally been reduced to on paper, making for a read that more closely reflects the chaos of life, both past and present.
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ABOUT THE BOOKA Fictional History of the United States (With Huge Chunks Missing)
Edited by T Cooper and Adam Mansbach
207 pages
$15.95
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