Contemporary Authors

• 6/2/95 ( novel) Spuyten Duyvil (New York, NY), 2001
• The Brooklyn Rail Fiction Anthology ( anthology) Hanging Loose Press (Brooklyn, NY), 2006
• You Are Here ( novel) Starcherone Books (Buffalo, NY), 2008
• And Then ( novel) Black Sparrow Books/David R. Godine (Boston, MA), 2017

1. And then LCCN 2016052960 Type of material Book Personal name Breckenridge, Donald, author. Main title And then / Donald Breckenridge. Edition First edition. Published/Produced Boston : Black Sparrow Books/David R. Godine, 2017. Description 101 pages ; 22 cm ISBN 9781574232295 (acid-free paper) CALL NUMBER PS3552.R3619 A85 2017 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 2. Henri Duchemin and his shadows LCCN 2014040972 Type of material Book Personal name Bove, Emmanuel, 1898-1945, author. Uniform title Henri Duchemin et ses ombres. English Main title Henri Duchemin and his shadows / Emmanuel Bove ; Translated from the French by Alyson Waters ; Introduction by Donald Breckenridge. Published/Produced New York : New York Review Books, [2015] Description xiv, 143 pages ; 21 cm. ISBN 9781590178324 (paperback : alk. paper) Shelf Location FLS2016 000282 CALL NUMBER PQ2603.O87 H4613 2015 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLS2) 3. You are here LCCN 2008044916 Type of material Book Personal name Breckenridge, Donald. Main title You are here / Donald Breckenridge. Edition 1st ed. Published/Created Buffalo, NY : Starcherone Books, c2008. Description 143 p. ; 23 cm. ISBN 9780978881184 (alk. paper) CALL NUMBER PS3552.R3619 Y68 2008 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 4. The Brooklyn Rail fiction anthology LCCN 2007276605 Type of material Book Main title The Brooklyn Rail fiction anthology / edited by Donald Breckenridge with editorial assistance from Jen Zoble. Published/Created Brooklyn, N.Y. : Hanging Loose Press, c2006. Description 420 p. ; 22 cm. ISBN 9781931236690 (pbk.) 1931236690 (pbk.) Shelf Location FLS2014 009525 CALL NUMBER PS648.S5 B76 2006 OVERFLOWA5S Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLS1) 5. 6/2/95 LCCN 2001049051 Type of material Book Personal name Breckenridge, Donald. Main title 6/2/95 / Donald Breckenridge. Published/Created New York : Spuyten Duyvil, c2001. Description 216 p. ; 21 cm. ISBN 1881471772 (pbk.) CALL NUMBER PS3552.R3619 A613 2001 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

• This Young Girl Passing - 2011 Autonomedia, New York, NY

• Vol. 1 Brooklyn - http://www.vol1brooklyn.com/2013/06/06/the-same-vines-twice-an-interview-with-donald-breckenridge-fiction-editor-of-the-brooklyn-rail/

  The Same Vines Twice: An Interview with Donald Breckenridge, Fiction Editor of The Brooklyn Rail
  By Nick Curley On June 6, 2013 · 1 Comment · In Conversations, Featured, Interviews, Lit.
  Donald1

  Donald Breckenridge has served as the fiction editor of The Brooklyn Rail since 2001. In addition he is the author of several novels, including You Are Here, 6/2/95, This Young Girl Passing, and Rockaway Wherein. His latest invention is the second volume of The Brooklyn Rail Fiction Anthology.

  This second helping of the Rail‘s fiction section is that rare collection that is joyfully archival: a work which genuinely spans the globe. It is a dusty-fingered, crypt-cracking dossier of stories that conjure laughter, fear, and awe. It reminds us that anthologies were once anthologia – “collections of flowers” – by forming a garland of wild blossoms, artfully linking Brooklyn-in-bloom to plants of international origin. Fair warning: the Rail‘s compiled fiction will send hapless rookies and even a few sage hounds back into dogged, lifelong addiction to thrilling tales and lost yarns. It will return you to that fabled moment when you first entered some back-alley record shop or bookstore in our fair borough and found gatekeepers sorting through stacks of unknown pleasures. Breckenridge and his band of archaeologists are those treasured excavators who stood before you and uttered those magic words, “Have you ever tried this? Because if you like that, this’ll knock you out.”

  In Breckenridge’s beautiful Bedford-Stuyvesant home – one brimming with books – he prepared the two of us a fantastic lunch, poured an excellent wine, and shared some of the story of how he became an editor, wine seller, and fiction writer.

  The anthology is dedicated to Barney Rosset, the former editor of Grove Press.

  He was my “in” to literature, along with reading Ionesco in school. The book’s dedicated to Barney, and Grove published Ionesco along with so many other great writers. Barney was a remarkable person: he gave me the Ionesco piece in the book. Spending time with him was quintessential. When I first came to New York, I had a list of all the former addresses of Grove, because they moved around three or four times in their lifespan. I went to all the different addresses, just to see them. So to finally meet Barney and drink martinis with him and his wife Astrid was a great time. I always felt like I could have spent more time with them, but I didn’t want to be a pest or a nuisance. I read the books he published about New York – Selby, Miller, Burroughs – and they really made me want to move here. Sort of like when you listen to the Velvet Underground.

  It seems important to have those mentor figures, or idols who become mentors, especially in the New York of the eighties, which has for people my age this dark, romantic aura of a place where one got stabbed every night of the week.

  I lived in Fort Greene, a neighborhood that was plunged into the crack epidemic. There were shootings every night, murders on the block, ten and twelve year old boys on the corner selling crack. And you got to know them, and their parents. And I bounced around, working terrible jobs. Fort Greene is completely gentrified now, but eventually I was living rent free for a long time, from ’92 to ’97, working for a friend as the super of the building.

  Being a super has always felt like an interesting job to me, in that it’s a close quarters engagement of humanity, where you see people at their best and their worst, and ideally serve to help them in a very direct way.

  It all sounds very romantic, but the truth is I just got lucky. I befriended a poet who owned the building. Sadly, he drank himself to death, and his wife came out from New Mexico, and she entrusted it to me. Fort Greene’s always been incredibly beautiful, but it wasn’t a particularly desirable area back then. The bank didn’t foreclose for a long time, but I’m sure that now that place is easily worth two a half million. But I seriously can’t put a nail in a wall, so it was always like, “Uh… we’ll deal with this! Your ceiling’s collapsed? I’ll totally call somebody!” But if you were late with the rent, I was cool with that. I was twenty-four: what am I gonna do? “Hey man, we’ve got muscle coming.”

  “The same guy I got to fix your ceiling is gonna come beat the hell out of you.”

  The kicker was the furnace, which would break for weeks at a time, always in the dead of winter when it was so brutally cold.

  You were writing a lot at this time?

  I was reading a lot. I didn’t have the confidence to be a writer, and I was out of work, but I had a period of about nine months where I read a novel a day. I was fully immersed. I had done theater, but I didn’t have the confidence to write, or the money to do theater anymore. The most valuable thing you can have, especially when you’re that young, is to have enough time to figure out how it is that you wanna do what you wanna do, and to be able to fumble into it. Like how you were talking before we started recording about what you thought this novel that you’re working on was going to be, then discovering a smaller, more personal story which you enjoy more.

  Life intervenes and hopefully gets a writer closer to detailing their own singular experience. What were you reading during this novel-a-day period, and how does it relate to your work today at the Rail? There was this period before you became a professional wherein you were gearing up: you’re saturated with influence.

  I didn’t go to college, but I’d always been an avid reader. Modernism was really important to me, but also a lot of writing in translation from Europe and Japan. So much of what I was into then I continue to be into now. They’re often deemed inaccessible or difficult writers, but I don’t know to whom they’re difficult in comparison. I remember discovering Celine in tenth grade and thinking he was amazing. It wasn’t until I was in my mid-twenties that people started telling me he was hard to read, when I found him to be someone who made me want to read more and seek out others of his generation.

  This is a coarse example, from Penn Jillette of all people, who’s kind of a blowhard in some respects, but when he was in high school he very consciously sought out the smart girls who were reading De Sade and Henry Miller, because he supposed that if they enjoyed reading about sex, they’d likely want to have some.

  Smart girls are the sexy ones. But we’re gonna get in trouble for that one, as it really smacks of… the patriarchs! Pontificating!

  How’d you get hooked up with the Grove crew?

  Oh, that was years later. The Ionesco piece that [the Rail] got from Barney was published in like, ’06. The truth is that I just don’t like to bother people, but I’ve still had some incredible conversations over the years with great writers. David Markson was really incredible. I remember when I first called Gilbert Sorrentino, it was to ask him to read at the library, and I remember even saying his full name over the phone was amazing. Being an editor at the Rail, I have a great deal of freedom, and so I just try to put out as much good writing as possible and let the readers figure out what they like, by keeping the quality high, but also varied. I want always to keep an open mind about what we publish, and I really don’t want to be didactic. I have no interest in being a gatekeeper or trendsetter. There’s so much time and energy wasted on aspiring to deny others great writing. Wondering what’s commercially viable or cool… there’s no commercial conceit to the Rail, which leaves it wide open.

  There seems a prevailing idea in many arts that the more exclusive you are, the higher quality of party you’ll get to attend, when in reality the people who are much more open and gregarious have more fun in the long run.

  But they don’t get invited to those parties. Or they do and they leave early. They have jobs! But for the Rail, it’s always been: everybody in the pool. Let’s open all the channels and get as much out as possible, so long as the quality is there and the work is singular.

  With the Rail, were you in on the ground floor?

  They’d published three issues by the time I started. This sounds like a story, but it’s actually true: in February of 2000, there was a stack of what I think was the second issue of the Rail at Mercer Books, and I tripped over the pile. They were on the ground and I was looking at the stacks, not paying attention. I picked up a copy and brought it home. It looked like I could send my own work there, and they published an excerpt of my first novel. I got to know Ted Hamm, the founding editor of the paper, and I started sending them work by friends of mine, which they published as well. I sent Ted a letter in October of 2001 asking if he wanted a fiction editor. I was happy to do it, because I thought that the paper was important. It was free. There were no ads. It seemed like the right place: if you could get your friends in, there were probably other exciting people around the world who you could present to readers. It hasn’t really changed in that regard since then. I was never taking this on so that I could be an editor at the New Yorker or some other place: it was just this.

  It seems not unlike the Nouvelle Vague directors who wrote for Cahiers du Cinema: Rohmer, Godard, Truffaut, Rivette. Artists who were able to write fiction while being celebratory, critical purveyors of other people’s work. And it often seems that the headaches of editorial work are often self-induced. Curators will sometimes make things harder than they want to be self-important, or have some title and sense of prestige.

  But that’s probably how they fuck up the rest of their lives too. Editing is just a side project for the rest of the calamity that comprises their existence. Including the spouses of other editors.

  That’s staying in the interview, by the way. Part of the reputation of the Rail is that it’s very by committee, that there is less of a hierarchy in place than certain other comparable publications, and that there is an autonomy between sections. And that there’s a consistency in how it’s produced.

  Definitely. One difference between then and now is that I don’t produce as many readings as I used to: we used to have a lot of them at the central branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. Putting on a reading series is great fun, but also a tremendous amount of work and worry. You get a blizzard and nobody shows up. So many factors can wreck a show, whereas with the paper it’s very tight, concise, and something over which you can have more control.

  Did you envision yourself as a journalist?

  Never. But I just wanted to write. When I took this on, I never thought I’d be doing it so many years later, and I certainly never thought I’d be talking about it this intensively…

  …into a robot?

  Into a machine! But no, I primarily saw myself as a writer, and still do. I write every day. And these other outlets enhance that work. And I’m still doing it. I must be insane, but it’s fun.

  In terms of that daily grind of being a novelist, what works for you in composing fiction writing? For all the readers out there who aspire to write fiction, I’d like to ask about your methods, what works for you in terms of practicing the daily act, and what you’ve learned from a perspective of “If I knew then what I know now…”

  I’ve made some extraordinary mistakes, and I’ve learned from them. But when you’re in a novel, or short story, you need to write every day. You get up every day and you work. And you work until you can’t anymore, then you worry about the rest of your life. One thing that I’m often guilty of doing is sending my work out before it’s really finished. I get excited about something, and I can’t see how others will read it. I’m kind of blind to it, and so convinced that it’s done. I don’t let things incubate, and then four or five days later I’ll look at it and go, “Oh my god! I can’t believe this.” And I can’t unsend it to this person who I cared most about giving it to, who I most wanted to read it and publish me. I sent it to them first, and three or four months before it was ready.

  Speaking for myself, I’m in a very extroverted phase where I want to expel every idea I’m having into the world. But in earlier years, I had a hard time showing work to people at all. I think a lot of people are on that other side of the spectrum, who have two-thirds of a manuscript in their desk that goes unpublished because they were too afraid to hear feedback.

  I wish I was more like that, though! I get excited, and I should be excited, but when I get excited, there’s a mechanism that clicks in that says, “If you’re happy, it must be finished!”

  Journalism, whether it’s penicillin or a Band-Aid, is one solution to this problem, in that there’s a deadline. It will be as ready as it’s going to be when the time to file your piece approaches.

  Fiction is different, though. Fiction writers are often in such a hurry to get something published, and then it’s out in the world, and it’s going to be around a lot longer than you want it to be out in the world.

  Donald2

  The Internet teaches us this constantly. Old pieces can haunt you when revisited.

  I’d love to have every copy of my first novel. Not because it was a terrible book. Well, yes, because it’s a terrible book. But I didn’t think it was terrible at the time. It was a necessary book at the time, because I never thought I could write a novel. By some miracle it got published. But I wish they were all gone. David Foster Wallace who called the first novel “the beautiful stillborn”, or “beautiful mutant child”, or something that I wish I could remember. You can look at half of the baby and it’s okay, but not the other half, which is kind of shriveled.

  People are sending money to your first book because they saw it on an infomercial.

  Sally Struthers is urging you to please give.

  But it’s a youthful discharge. You have something to expel, and getting it out is what’s paramount.

  It was the most important thing I’d ever done, and I was thirty-three. I didn’t think I could do it. Jesus, no. I loved to read, but that didn’t make me a writer. Writing every day makes you a writer. But the idea of writing that’s never shown to anyone else makes me think of Borges’ idea of the greatest library being an invisible one.

  Talk about a guy with a day job.

  Right.

  I always think of him as the ultimate clerk, the best example of producing incredible work while holding down a steady gig.

  And being blind. But yes: Kafka, Pessoa, Borges… Pessoa was the least ambitious. Kafka was funny as hell. Calvino had a day job, didn’t he? Calvino lived a life. Natsume Sōseki was a professor for many years.

  I read more working as a clerk in an antique store than I did in four years of college. I had more time and more genuine inquiry. You can have as many hours as you want to write, but in a sense if you aren’t as devoted to reading as you are to writing, then you don’t step on the grapes, so to speak. But to switch gears: how has the Rail changed in your time there?

  Initially, Brooklyn was a lot smaller and the paper was geared to a very clear audience. This was following what had been a very quiet era in Brooklyn, before it was considered – and this still cracks me up – the literary mecca. When I came here, you were told that you didn’t want to live here. And now Brooklyn has topped Manhattan as this height of art and culture. But the paper back then was for a small community of artists, writers, and leftists. The readership has expanded since then. And in addition to international writers, I’ve been focused on trying to publish writers who were overlooked. The paper looks much better than it used to. Long ago it was to be given out at the Bedford L train, for your ride into Manhattan. The Rail is very rooted in Brooklyn, but it’s Brooklyn with both its feet on the ground. That it’s both free of charge and diverse in its writing is really important. But that was Brooklyn before the Gold Rush, and will hopefully be Brooklyn after the Gold Rush.

  Though while it’s tragic to see artists priced out of homes or otherwise displaced, it does seem that in considering the creative types who made you want to come to New York… there will always be weird people. Wild living isn’t going out of style, whether it’s Miller or Hubert Selby or whomever else.

  And I’m not saying that no one should come here, but if you do, then start a band, or a magazine, or a theater, or a small press. It’s a lot more expensive than it used to be, but when you’re taking so much time out of your day to make art, it doesn’t really matter where you go in order to pursue it. You can come to New York and be just as hungry as you would be in Detroit or Berlin or wherever. There’s still great people coming here all the time to make art and enrich their lives.

  We both started out doing more theater work than prose writing: what are your recollections of that time and how it formed your current sensibility?

  I got kicked out of school, but by then had befriended a lot of theater people. I started working at a liquor store on Myrtle Avenue, and the other clerk had founded an artist collective. So this group of Pratt students got together and rented a store front on Bedford and South 1st, and called it Brand Name Damages. It was a tiny gallery, and ironically it’s now another liquor store. Paintings and sculptures on the walls and floor: the sculptor Roxy Paine came out of there. He also did the music for the first play I wrote. Part of which was this Kurt Schwitters piece where this man comes home from work and throws up everywhere. I used oatmeal to just vomit all over the room. We’d taken police barricades and sawed them in half, put them on cinder blocks, and that was what the audience sat on. Twenty-four people packed to the gills, and I’m throwing up oatmeal onto the floor before being flogged by another actress. I was twenty-one, twenty-two? It was Dada: a Big Lebowski moment.

  The romantic allure of Brooklyn is that such experiences feel timeless: that each generation is able to find their fellow oddities willing to share in oatmeal vomit, and forums to stage your strangest impulses. After Armageddon, the two things that will endure are cockroaches and performance art.

  And zombie movies.

  Are there aspects of the job that you’d change given the opportunity?

  Not of the job necessarily, but perhaps it would be more fun to see more of an interplay between reader and author. But part of the issue is that fewer people read nowadays. The bulk of people who used to don’t anymore, and it isn’t a priority for young people growing up now. They’re not indoctrinated.

  Do you recall more of a public dialogue about books occurring a generation ago?

  Absolutely. In part, publishing nowadays is geared toward celebrity authors, as is every other facet of entertainment or politics. Here I go, winding up the old crank. [inflecting a crotchety voice] “It’s not about quality, it’s about celebrity!” And who cares about that? If you’re spending your life doing this, you should do the best work you can and not worry about how many people will read it, because at the end of the day the most important person reading it is the person writing it.

  As an editor, who do you want to publish? Moreover, what makes for a good editorial colleague?

  Engagement. High level of passion. In a writer you want someone who will bring you something beautiful, and again, singular. In an editor, the people I work with are offended by typos and psychotic about grammar. Because I’m not, I’m fortunate to have people who are such sticklers for detail. To have their names on it is pretty amazing. The two roles compliment one another. A writer spends so much time on a sentence, paragraph, or page that it’s hard to see it anymore. It’s about refreshing your eye, seeing a new perspective in pursuit of the least redundancy, the best rhythm, and the most clarity, as concisely as possible. An editor aids that experience. The composition of good writing is something you hear. It’s like Thelonious Monk. There’s the composition, and there’s the space around the composition which allows you to fully find yourself in relation to it and enjoy what you’re experiencing. The dissonance and negative space.

  How’s writing going for you these days?

  I’ve finished my fourth manuscript in January. I think it’s good and sent it to some people. This is why writers should feel in no rush to send out their work until it’s finished: you’ll wait forever to hear back from anyone you care about. And I’ve been writing short stories for the first time since I started writing fiction, and it’s really fun. I’m just about done with one, and was asked to contribute to a journal. There’s a novel that I’m not emotionally ready to write, but until I am, short stories have been a real pleasure.

  To actually know when you’re emotionally ready or in the mindset to write a certain book seems knowledge which really comes from experience. That’s a big step forward.

  You know from your own experience that there’s an immense emotional weight and time commitment to writing a novel. The one that I want to write is about the last few years of my father’s life. He passed away in 2010, and we were very close. At night, when I think about what I need to do to write that book, I know that emotionally I’m not ready to pull that off. But that’s a long way from now. What’s nice about short fiction is that you can get it out there: there are more venues to publish, and it’s great to write every day.

  When I was younger, I organically wrote constantly, whether it was in a journal or fiction for my own amusement. But after college, for a few years there, I got very concerned about prestige and how I would present myself. I got precious about it, and thus got scared. It takes time to refind that exuberance or love of the game.

  The spontaneity. But also, while this sounds really hokey, I pass by my desk each day, and I look at the light from the window falling down upon the desk. It looks so beautiful that I really do want to sit there. It’s amazing. That desk is worn at the elbows.

  I’m not a pious or even spiritual person necessarily, but writing is the one thing that I do get ritualistic about, or utilize to enter a meditative state.

  You go there and there was a sentence that you were either dying to write from the night before, or which was problematic the day before. And you’ve slept on it, and maybe there’s a new approach. Maybe it’s two sentences, or it shouldn’t be there at all. It’s got to go. And before you know it, you’re back at the desk.

  One of the most satisfying moments can be when you gather something up and hit Delete. It’s a sigh of relief.

  And now the rest of the day will be good. Because I accomplished something which was necessary!

  What are your future aspirations as an editor, in terms of what you’re reading and what you want to publish?

  I’m reading Dante right now, but that’s not likely to find itself in the Rail. [Gathering multiple translations and editions of The Divine Comedy from the next room] The best way for me to read it is this. I read one from the illustrated edition first, then I go into the Princeton series, then I read the commentary, then I read the lecture, which has a canto in it. I try to read one a night.

  “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” But it feels like you’re really digging in the crates with this approach, in a scholarly, inquisitive manner.

  It’s scavenging, really, which is how I do everything now. What do we need to do in a day? Wake up, write, find a way to make money, cook, clean, read, buy records.

  Do you have any closing words of wisdom for young writers? Frankly, a lot of the people who read Vol. 1 likely do have writing that they’re doing, or aspire to do, if only to present it to themselves or their peers. If you were talking to a slightly younger Donald who was just starting out, what might you say?

  I certainly wouldn’t listen to an older Donald. Don’t listen to anyone. You’ll figure it out. Did you actually get advice that you listened to? Nobody actually takes advice! I mean, we all ask for it, but you never take it. I don’t have any advice, and that is my advice. Which is good advice. Just read. Read books. Or maybe I should advise people to not read books, which will cause them to read in protest. People want to complicate it, but there’s no divine wisdom. No one who tells you that you can’t do it is worth a damn. If we all listened to our detractors, we’d all have drunk ourselves to death three or four times by now. When starting out, I got in my own way by not having the confidence that others who were excited about me had in my work. I didn’t ask for much advice, because most of the writers I like are either dead or living in other countries. Don’t get in your own way. Don’t aspire to be famous. Don’t worry about trying to be the latest hot young author named Jonathan.

  I was speaking at a class at the New School maybe seven years ago, and a student in all seriousness was very upset after I’d gone through an anti-commercial spiel. She asked aloud, “Why am I doing this if I’m not gonna make money?” To which I could only say, “You’re asking me?”

  I am interested that in your other daily occupation, you sell wine. I’m sure inspiration strikes while you’re at this other job.

  If you have an idea while you’re working, and it’s a good one, then you’ll remember it. You don’t necessarily have to write it down. And there are similarities to wine and books. Vineyards come out with a new bottle every year, and it isn’t ever the same wine twice, year over year. There are so many factors at play: the weather, the quality of the fruit, whether there was mold in the vineyard that year, or insects, or something happened in the winery. Likewise, you’re never writing the same book twice, even though you have the same material to work with.

  It’s a rather touching idea, that as a writer, you’re aware of your soil and how it changes over time.

  It’s always changing, and I think the most interesting wines are the ones that a winemaker will hang on to and let mature for a few years before it’s released, just as I’m starting to feel the same way about fiction. It’s farming, really. Foresting. The same vines never produce the same work twice.

• Bomb - https://bombmagazine.org/articles/and-then/

  And Then by Donald Breckenridge
  Jul 1, 2014
  First Proof
  Literature

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  Brian got up early that Saturday to do his laundry then tracked down a friend who owed him ten dollars and scored some crystal meth in the process. He met Suzanne by the token booth at the Clinton-Washington G stop, “I got two hits of acid on my way over here,” she exclaimed while passing through the wooden gate, “isn’t that insane,” which slammed behind her. The black and white images of Suzanne that he’d developed and printed as the week dragged on, “Are you serious?” now seemed feeble as they finally faced each other, “Where?” Her forearm brushed his, “Right near where we met,” as he led the way toward the exit, “in Washington Square.” When she passed through the gate and they embraced he knew something extraordinary was happening. Suzanne was undeniably beautiful and Brian mistook that for virtue. He spent Saturday afternoon assembling his best work then hung the black and white enlargements on the taut wire running across the living room. “How much did you pay for them?” She was wearing a low-cut black polyester top that accentuated her breasts, “Ten bucks,” a short denim skirt and high cork-heeled sandals, “the guy who sold them to me said I should take it with a friend.” The tall front windows were wide open and August sounds from the street—passing car stereos, trolling ice cream trucks, an argument between two women about a man who happened to be standing in front of the building, kids shouting from adjacent stoops and the ones clustered around the open hydrant down the block—filled the living room as he poured over the images. Scoring acid in Washington Square confirmed another part of the city’s mythology that Suzanne was eager to embrace. Brian had done two hits last March, “I bet you got ripped off,” and tripped alone in his apartment, “you really shouldn’t buy that from people you don’t know,” during a three-day blizzard, “especially in the park,” nearly four feet of snow fell over the weekend, “unless you like throwing your money away on little bits of paper,” he spent in an armchair in front of the window overlooking Lafayette Avenue, “or we can burn money instead,” studying his perpetually morphing reflection in glowing planes of glass, “that’s always entertaining.” She turned to him, “There is only one way to find out,” and asked, “Aren’t you interested?” He did a bump of meth for luck, “Acid is for hippies,” just before leaving to meet her at the station, “but I’m game if you are.” As they climbed the stairs Brian asked, “How was the subway?” She removed a Bible tract from her purse, “Really fucking weird,” presented it to him, “someone gave me this,” then recalled the middle-aged preacher with the greasy comb-over sweating profusely in a beige polyester suit, “and the train took forever,” who demanded that Suzanne accept God’s salvation as she walked onto the piss-soaked downtown A platform at the furnace-like West 4th Street station, “I don’t know how people can do that every day.” Brian scoffed at the black-and-white illustration of an opened-armed Christ standing in a supermarket isle Jesus is everywhere and awaiting your love! “The A train doesn’t run express on the weekends.” When they emerged into Brooklyn sunlight, “Thanks for coming all the way out here,” Brian noted the deep blue of her eyes and wanted to see her saturated in Kodachrome. They lingered at the top of the stairs. A cloudless afternoon like today would be perfect. She raised her eyebrows then asked, “Which way?” He pointed and then they walked by the black Chevy Nova with the shattered windshield propped up on cinder blocks.

  The woman standing next to Tom had recently emigrated from Poland, early or maybe mid-thirties, shoulder-length straight brown hair with blonde streaks, wide hazel eyes behind rectangular purple frames, arched eyebrows, dark red lips, long fingers, gold wedding band, glossy pink fingernails. Her heavily accented English was adequate. They talked about the weather then Tom mentioned a few out of the way places worth seeing during the summer—the Cloisters, Coney Island, Flushing Park, Far Rockaway—and received a lukewarm response. Had she been to the Met? Yes, she actually squeezed his forearm for emphasis, twice in one week. She, he never got her name, was nearly his height and very thin. Ten minutes later his well intentioned, naïve defense of Marxism was met with a wave of derision, as was her surprisingly lofty and equally naïve opinion of Ronald Reagan. Writing your undergraduate thesis on the Paris Commune might not make you an expert on Communism but how could anyone in their right mind believe that Reagan didn’t know anything about the Iran-Contra affair until it was reported in the media? After a pointed exchange Tom acknowledged being raised Catholic, claimed he was an atheist, mentioned his recent experiences with the supernatural, then stated that he hadn’t stepped inside a church in ten years. In turn she laughingly said that when young she had wanted to be a nun. The tiny gold cross and thin chain around her neck held the dim bar light. She pressed him for details about those supposed supernatural experiences. Tom said he was cat-sitting for his professor while she was in Greece for the summer and enthusiastically described the oblique shape that drifted through her kitchen during a thunderstorm then recounted his extraordinary encounter with a mysterious blonde on the stairs. The red leather purse lying open on the zinc bar held a silver money clip with a few fives and a ten, a pack of Parliaments, a box of matches and a tube of lipstick. She said her husband was at a boring business dinner or something equally dull and dismissively unspecific. Pleated knee-length black skirt, black sandals with thin leather straps wrapping around narrow ankles, symmetrical pink toenails. Would she like to go somewhere quiet where they could talk? The semi-transparent sleeveless white blouse revealed enticing views of her black bra. That haunted apartment happened to be right around the corner. The pause grew awkward when an unlikely lull in the surrounding Wednesday evening conversations accompanied a brief lapse between songs. Tom couldn’t bring himself to repeat the question or further elaborate on the convenience of the nearby location and simply stood before her expectantly clutching a flat pint of watery beer. She finally responded, looking up at him from behind the rims of her purple frames, saying yes, an enticing smile revealed two rows of crowded teeth, why not, they did have enough time to leave the narrow bar that was just around the corner from his haunted apartment, okay, let’s climb four flights of stairs and continue our conversation without having to compete with this continuous barrage of industrial techno. The old drunk on the stoop slurred something obscene that she didn’t understand although his accompanying gesture had universal significance. Tom fixed her a tall screwdriver, apologized for not having any ice, adding that the vodka had been in the freezer for at least a month. She claimed they didn’t have very much time and promptly drank half of it while standing before the kitchen counter. He chanced a quick kiss on her cheek. The spray of honeyed perfume lingering behind her ears reminded him of pollen-dusted bees. Her mouth tasted like vodka and cigarettes. She helped him undo the buttons on her blouse and bra clasp. His fingers covered a constellation of reddish freckles. Her small brown nipples were already hard. She closed her eyes when they kissed, embraced, and kissed before moving toward the front room. He kicked off his sneakers in the doorway and she pulled off his T-shirt. Two pairs of glasses clattered off the stack of splayed paperbacks and onto the floor. She dropped the top then stepped out of the skirt, shed the beige cotton panties but left her sandals on. It took him a long minute to find the condoms without his glasses, naked and blushing in the curtained sunset, yet he denied being nervous. She slowly unrolled one over his erection then rode him with her eyes closed, purposefully grinding away, rubbing her clitoris with two then four fingers. He watched in disbelief as she reached a quick climax—felt it flutter through her pelvis—then gripped her waist with both hands and fucked her like he wanted to take the orgasm back. She came again just before he did.

  Brian wanted to photograph Suzanne in the ocean while silhouetted by the rising sun. He jumped out of bed to retrieve a book and returned flipping through pages. When Brian found the Botticell reproduction he passed her the book. They could go to the nudist-end of Riis Beach and if they left now they might be there by dawn. She agreed to be his Venus only if they took a cab to the beach. She also agreed to pay for the car. He took two rolls of color slide film from the refrigerator door before calling the car service. Coltrane was on the radio and they smoked in silence while listening to an endlessly cascading solo. Brian attached a wide-angle lens to his Nikon and loaded a roll of film into the camera. The black Plymouth Fury pulled up outside the building and honked twice. He flicked his cigarette into the gutter before opening the rear door. They slid across the wide black vinyl backseat. The goateed driver with horned rimmed glasses and long black hair eyed them in the rearview mirror before pulling away from the curb and stomping on the gas. The car raced up Lafayette then swung left against a yellow onto Classon. As they sped onto the BQE a static-filled version of “Summer Breeze” segued into a seemingly endless series of commercials.

  A loud roll of thunder got Tom up from the table and over to the kitchen window. The oak branches were shaking in the wind. He removed the fan and placed it on the floor. The rear row of buildings and towering tree obscured his view. He walked through the darkened apartment and recalled a cloudless, nearly cerulean, blue sky when waking a few hours ago. The front room smelled like rain on hot concrete. A cool wind was flipping through the pages of Sade’s Juliette that he’d left on the futon. Menacing black clouds were piled on top of each other. He watched their ragged ends block out the noonday sun. The light above the deserted block turned from the sepia of old photographs into ominous night. In an open window across the street agile brown arms gathered up a billowing white curtain then pulled the window closed. A blonde walked quickly up the stoop and into the building. He heard the front doors slam then hurried footfalls echoed off the stairs. A flash of lightning followed by a nearly instantaneous crash of thunder created a chorus of car alarms. When the downpour began in earnest a few pale faces appeared in the windows across the street. Steam rose from the sidewalk as water overran the gutters. Tom noticed that the screens were getting soaked and closed the windows. He met a terrified Olive in the hall just before another flash of lighting and boom of thunder sent her tearing into the bedroom where she vanished beneath Paula’s bed. Handwritten pages of the Marx outline were strewn across the kitchen table. The box fan blew over, crashed into the cat bowls and began knocking rhythmically against the floor. He yanked the plug from the socket, closed the window and moved the fan away from the puddle. And that was when the oblique shape drifted along the wall. Later he would claim that it was like watching the shadow of a hawk slowly glide over an open meadow. He turned around and a warm, human dampness clung to his chest and arms. The checkered Linoleum floor creaked beneath an invisible weight. The shadow gradually moved along the cabinets before slipping down the hall. Tom’s heart was thumping in his throat. The kitchen was just as empty as it had been all week, yet the air was charged with energy. He took the knife from the sink and peered into the hall. The rain on the roof and occasional rumble of thunder accompanied Tom as he cautiously crept through each room with the knife clenched in his right fist. When confronting his pale, wide-eyed reflection in the bathroom mirror he noticed the butter smeared on the blade.

  Suzanne removed her sandals at the bottom of the stairs, “You never think of the ocean when you think of New York City,” the sand was cool beneath her bare feet, “but this is a really nice beach.” The hollow sound tall waves make as they roll against the shore. Standing naked on the beach and facing the sea—orange sunlight highlighting her blue eyes as a warm breeze pulled at her shoulder-length blonde hair—with a distant full moon filling in the upper left corner of the image. He asked her to swim out, “Maybe fifty feet and then come back really slowly,” before taking a picture of her walking into the rush of a receding wave. Three photographs as she turned toward the sun, took a few steps into the waist-high surf, and dove beneath a towering wave. He peeled off his clothes as she swam out beyond the breakers. The velvety blue sky was still studded with stars. The streetlights lining the empty boardwalk blinked twice before going out. A group of gulls had gathered around their discarded clothes. Brian carefully waded into the water with the camera raised above his head. Suzanne could touch her toes on the cold bottom before and after the passing swells. She was a silver silhouette amidst a warm spray of foamy blue green water. Rays of sunlight flooding the viewfinder highlighted her torso. Prisms gathered around the edge of the lens, saturating her blurred torso. Six months later the image of Suzanne with her arms outstretched and legs suspended above a rush of pale foam landed Brian his first group show at a gallery on 57th Street and a brief mention in the Times.

  She was already dressed when Tom joined her in the kitchen. “You know something strange?” She asked, looking somehow older yet more beautiful as she lit a cigarette off the stove. Handing her the glasses, “What’s that?” She put them on before saying, “My husband is friends with that photographer.” The lenses held the overhead light, distorting the shape and color of her eyes. “What photographer?” Pointing, “That’s a Brian Kimble,” at the framed color photograph of the blonde standing naked on a beach that hung on the wall beside the telephone, “You don’t know him, but you have a picture?”

  Sleeping beneath packing blankets flecked with vomit and splotched with dried blood. She met Yvonne and Nick at a gay disco on King Street. Curly blond locks pooled on a pink bath towel. They befriended a bemused Suzanne after the bearded Canadian disk jockey that had dragged her there from Phoebe’s disappeared around midnight with a petite Puerto Rican transvestite. Streaks of rainwater ran down the tall windows overlooking Central Park. Yvonne was a diplomat’s daughter and a self-professed anarchist obsessed with Louise Brooks. Gold parquet floors, a high molded ceiling and a gaping marble fireplace. Nick was a skinny orange-haired punk with a budding heroin addiction. The ornate gilded mirror above the marble mantel reproduced a portion of the empty bookshelves spanning the length of the wall. Yvonne had been tasked with overseeing the packing and closing up of this palatial apartment before joining her parents in Paris. Black stilettos, a pair of red patent leather knee-high boots, black nylons, blue cotton panties, a white dress shirt and a mini-skirt were strewn across the dusty floor. Nick lied about dropping out of Brooklyn College and told everyone who would listen that he was starting his own record label. The water in the chipped wine glass was beaded with oxygen. Yvonne was bound for the Sorbonne and guaranteed confinement in a stratum that she would continue to rebel against while living a life of privilege. A black lace bra, bamboo chopsticks and grease-splotched takeout containers, chunks of blackened aluminum foil. Their frequently hilarious Boris and Natasha meets a debased Romeo and Juliet routine finally wore thin when Yvonne vomited into Suzanne’s lap after shooting a speedball. The overflowing Pan Am ashtray, a small green disposable lighter, a trail of cotton balls, crumpled bloody tissues and empty glassine bindles cluttered the top of the cardboard wardrobe box before the daybed. Suzanne removed her soiled dress in the bathroom and soaked it in the sink. After snorting and freebasing cocaine for three nights and two days with Nick, Yvonne and a cluster of her best friends—all supposedly crushed that such an incredibly cool connection was abandoning them for Paris—Suzanne decided to try heroin. Nick dutifully cooked up a tiny bit from his dwindling stash as she tied off her left arm with a bra strap, “Make a fist,” after a few near misses he hooked the thin green vein, “now let it go,” with a stainless steel surgical syringe.

  Olive jumped onto the kitchen table to get a better look at her. The breeze from the box fan in the window cooled the sweat on Tom’s forehead and bare chest, “That’s not mine,” picking up her glass, “this is my professor’s place,” which was damp, “I’m just here for the summer,” and when he drank from it, “but no,” condensation trailed down his left wrist, “I don’t know his work.” “You’re serious?” She sounded surprised, “that’s an early one,” exhaling smoke, “what a pretty cat,” then added a few lines in Polish that neither Tom nor the cat understood. Olive sat back on her haunches and began licking her belly. “He has a show right now in Soho,” taking a drag off her cigarette before suggesting, “you should go see it.” Tom sounded indifferent, “I’m not really into art,” while thinking of the prints and contact sheets he’d found in one of the boxes that Paula had asked him to throw away, “but is that worth a lot of money?” She nodded, “Everything sold at the opening,” then noticed the clock on the wall, “I have to leave.” It was seven-thirty. “Maybe we have time for another—” “No,” shaking her head, “I have to go back,” but was touched by his disappointment, “to where my husband is meeting me.” Tom sighed, “That was really nice.” “Yes,” she gathered her purse from the counter, “but I didn’t get to meet your ghost.” He led her to the door, “Maybe next time,” and watched her descend a flight of stairs. When she didn’t look back he closed the door. Tom crossed the kitchen, realized that he didn’t get her name, and examined her lipstick on the rim of the glass. Olive jumped onto the counter. “Do you want to know something strange?” Tom caressed the black cat behind her ears before saying, “That was the best sex I’ve ever had.”

  The warmth in the crook of her arm passed into her fingertips before flooding her brain, washing over her heart, and kicking her in the stomach. Suzanne had lucked into an exclusive party with some totally cool and really beautiful rich kids in a giant vacant apartment overlooking Central Park. Her weekend of jaw-grinding unblinking confidence had just been run over by a bus. The mosquito-sized bite of white heroin was still chasing stubborn chunks of bile around the back of her throat. Her naked, ghost-like fluorescent reflection in the wall-sized bathroom mirror gave her butterflies. Now they were totally out of everything and Nick was yelling at Yvonne for slicing open all of the straws and licking them clean like some fucking fiend. Suzanne just needed another minute alone to relax, maybe take a warm bath, maybe catnap for an hour or two then she could think about going home. Yvonne was pounding on the bathroom door as Nick pocketed the remaining bills in Suzanne’s wallet. Her legs finally gave out and she crumpled on the black and white tiles. Nick called Yvonne a freak and made sure to slam the front door. Her narrow alabaster face, “What are you doing like that,” pocked with acne and framed by a blue-black bob, “on the floor,” and a smile that twisted into a grimace, “do you want to take a bath,” when Suzanne finally opened her eyes. There was nobody around Sherman Square that early on a Monday morning in the pouring rain. Suzanne tried coughing up a mouthful of whatever was making her gag before rasping, “I was going to,” then wiped her hands on a wad of toilet paper. Nick had to take the 2 train up to 125th and Lenox to score.

  Tom woke up with a headache. A loud argument running along the block escalated from shouted curses to thrown bottles and abruptly ended with four rapid pops that must have been gunshots. He knocked the box of Q-tips into the sink while rooting through the cabinet for aspirin. Alternating sirens rapidly approaching from opposite directions indicated that the police and an ambulance were on the way. He swallowed two tablets with a palm-full of warm tap water then caught a glimpse of his bleary-eyed self in the mirror. Pulsating red and blue lights saturated the ceiling. He lay down on the futon and waited for the throbbing between his temples to subside. Static-punctuated numerical commands from police radios filled the humid air. The wooden chair before the desk appeared animated in the fluctuating glow. EMSpersonnel loaded a victim into the idling ambulance. He couldn’t see the desk clock, couldn’t be bothered with putting on his glasses and assumed it was between four and five. A door slammed before the diesel engine was finally shifted into drive. He thought of the aspirin dissolving in his stomach while clutching a feather pillow in his arms. Tom drifted off alternately wondering if the shooting would be in the news and how his body knew exactly where to send the pain relief.

  Suzanne took a final drag off the cigarette, “His helicopter was shot down,” then crushed it in the ashtray, “but he saved a few people before he died so they gave him the Purple Heart.” Nick drew the brown liquid off the blackened spoon, “How old were you?” through the tiny clump of cotton and into the syringe. “I was seven.” “He was a pilot?” “An advisor,” Suzanne shook her head, “some fishermen found his body.” “And your mom,” Nick fingered the vein in the crook of her left arm, “what’s the story there?” “My mother left me after that,” Suzanne winced, “like a few days after the funeral,” as Nick sank the needle, “she left me with her parents,” and pulled off the belt. “So you were,” he watched the heroin wash over her, “raised by your grandparents?” The second side of Bowie’s Hunky Dory was playing quietly on the portable turntable. “I never saw my mom again.” A gust of snow covered the window overlooking the darkened block. “I guess she couldn’t deal with me,” her eyes softened, “so in a way,” as she watched the black kitten sleeping on the pillow, “they both died in Vietnam.” “You must remember them,” Nick sounded very far away, “that’s something,” although he was right beside her cooking up his hit. Suzanne lay back on the mattress, “I have memories of them,” and closed her eyes, “but they aren’t very useful.”

  Brian recognized his handwriting, “Do you want money,” an old Brooklyn address on the worn manila envelope, “is that why you’re here?” Tom was seated on the edge of the black couch, “No I just,” in a colossal loft, “I’m completely broke,” with his back to a tall row of open windows, “but that’s not why I’m here,” eight stories above Broadway, “to be honest,” on a hot Wednesday afternoon, “I really hadn’t thought of that.” Brian undid the metal clasp and removed the pictures, “Where did you get these?” It took Tom an afternoon to find the gallery, “They were in these boxes that I was asked to throw away and I,” two days after telling the owner what he had, “when I opened one of them I found these pictures,” he received a call informing him that Brian Kimble would meet with him at his Soho loft tomorrow afternoon. “Where were they?” Tom cleared his throat, “I’m cat sitting at my professor’s place for the summer,” then rubbed his damp palms on the knees of his jeans, “Professor Avloniti?” “Paula,” Brian tried to smile, “They were in her apartment?” Tom nodded, “Yeah.” Brian came to the picture of Suzanne looking pensive in the back of a cab. Was he on the verge of telling her that he had fallen in love with her and maybe they should talk about living together? Or was that the night he discovered the tracks running along her left arm? Either way she freaked out on him again for never being able to acknowledge her forever-changing boundaries. Whenever they went to clubs or shows she would be surrounded by a half-dozen guys the minute he turned his back—complimenting her hair and clothes—wanting to dance with her or share their drugs or get her number if only that tool on her arm would take a hike. He would fend them off as best he could then spend the rest of the night trying to reconnect with her without being a hypersensitive-possessive-pig about it at the risk of losing her to the most aggressive asshole in the jostling circle of tweaked suitors. Her heavy heroin use was really the end of them, and that argument might have been the last time they ever saw each other. “Along with some records and clothes.” Rumor had it that she was dead, in jail, or had left town. “But I didn’t know who you were or that they might be worth anything.” Brian never knew that Suzanne died from an overdose and that her body was dumped in the East River. He set the images on the coffee table, “She was my,” beside a pack of unfiltered Camels, “she was Paula’s roommate,” and a small disposable green lighter, “this was twelve years ago.” Tom swallowed hard before asking, “Do you know what happened to her?” “She started using heroin,” Brian shrugged, “cause that’s what all the cool idiots were doing,” scratched the stubble on his chin, “then just vanished,” looked blankly at the young man sitting across from him, “but we weren’t that close anymore,” and sighed.

  Suzanne lost count after five, maybe six, consecutive days of snow before it turned into steady rain. Thursday through Monday, or maybe it was Wednesday when the shit began in earnest. Was it still Monday? Although the illuminated blue clock on the wall of the dry cleaners indicated that it was only seven, the empty sidewalk and infrequent traffic made it seem much later. She thought of the blue skies and sandy beaches found in the glossy pages of travel magazines. What if this metal door opened onto an impossibly bright and beautiful sandy beach? She removed her keys while climbing the stoop and unlocked the door. Turquoise waves quietly washed upon a pristine shore as warm ocean breezes scented with tropical blossoms carried the calls of exotic birds. When Suzanne closed the umbrella cold water splashed on her left wrist. She stepped around bundles of soaked newspaper then slowly climbed four flights of filthy stairs. Suzanne dropped the umbrella by the mat then turned the keys in their locks before pushing open the door.

  Tom was on the landing unlocking the door to Paula’s apartment when the wooden steps creaked as if someone was walking up the stairs. He turned around and immediately recognized the blonde from the photographs. She was dressed in a long black coat and carrying a black umbrella in her right hand. He didn’t have time to step out of the way or even be afraid. A cold breeze carried a pure, mentholated energy and when that entered his chest it coursed through every cell. It was a vibrantly white sensation that caused the hair on the back of his head to stand on end. Tom never forgot the feeling or tired of telling the story—she just walked right through him.

  Donald Breckenridge is the author of This Young Girl Passing, You Are Here, 6/2/95, and Rockaway Wherein. He is the fiction editor of The Brooklyn Rail, co-editor of In Translation and the managing editor of Red Dust. His new novel, which is yet to be titled, is forthcoming from Starcherone in 2015.

• David R. Godine, Publisher - http://www.godine.com/book-author/donald-breckenridge/

  Donald Breckenridge

  Donald Breckenridge lives in Brooklyn with his spouse, Johannah Rodgers. He is the Fiction Editor of the Brooklyn Rail, Co-Founder and Co-Editor of InTranslation, and the Managing Editor of Red Dust Books. He has written four novels, edited two fiction anthologies, and introduced the NYRB Classics edition of Henri Duchemin and His Shadows by Emmanuel Bove.

• New York Review Books - https://www.nyrb.com/collections/donald-breckenridge

  DONALD BRECKENRIDGE Donald Breckenridge is the fiction editor of The Brooklyn Rail, co-editor of InTranslation, managing editor of Red Dust and the author of more than a dozen plays, a novella, and the novels 6/2/95, You Are Here, and This Young Girl Passing. He lives in Brooklyn.

• Numero Cinq - http://numerocinqmagazine.com/2011/10/19/our-endless-past-an-interview-with-donald-breckenridge-by-mary-stein/

  Quoted in SidelightsL “I really wanted to write a book about child abuse that wasn’t autobiographical, so that’s where I began with Sarah, from her reaction to a shitty home life which is my how and why she became involved with Bill,” he told Mary Stein in an interview published online at Numero Cinq. “I have never been even remotely interested in telling the real story of the actual participants in the article, that is absolutely none of my business, the truth really only belongs to the people involved. The article in the Times was simply a sketch and I let my imagination roll out from that point of departure.”
  Our Endless Past: An Interview with Donald Breckenridge — Mary Stein

  Donald Breckenridge has a story to tell you: He’s a failed-actor-turned-fiction-writer, playwright, literary activist/editor, and wine-seller who’s carving out a life for himself in New York City. Though I’ve never met Donald Breckenridge in the flesh, he’s the guy I’d like to meet for a beer. After reading his brand new novel, This Young Girl Passing (imminent from Autonomedia—see the Publishers Weekly review here; read an excerpt on NC here), it was clear to me that Breckenridge has a self-consciously intentional approach to crafting fiction, and this interview/conversation reiterates the thoughtfulness behind his work. If you haven’t met Donald Breckenridge already, it’s my pleasure to introduce you to him and his work in some small way.

  Donald Breckenridge is the author of more than a dozen plays as well as the novella Rockaway Wherein (Red dust, 1998) and the novels 6/2/95 and You Are Here (Starcherone Books, 2009). In addition, he is the fiction editor of The Brooklyn Rail, co-editor of the InTranslation website and editor of the The Brooklyn Rail Fiction Anthology (Hanging Loose Press, 2006). He is working on his fourth novel.

  Here is what NC Editor Douglas Glover wrote about This Young Girl Passing:

  This Young Girl Passing is a deceptively short, dense, ferociously poignant novel of sexual betrayal and despair set in impoverished upstate New York, a Raymond Carver-ish milieu of never-weres and left-behinds. Breckenridge is a pointillist, constructing scene after scene with precise details of dialogue and gesture, each tiny in itself but accumulating astonishing power and bleak complexity. The novel’s triumph though is in its architecture, its skillfully fractured chronology and the deft back and forth between the two main plot lines, two desperate, sad affairs twenty years apart and the hollow echoes in the blast zone of life around them.

  —Mary Stein

  .

  Our Endless Past: An Interview with Donald Breckenridge
  By Mary Stein
  .

  .

  MCS: Why don’t we start off with a little personal backstory: from thought to fruition, could you describe the gestation period of writing This Young Girl Passing? How did it compare with some of your other works?

  DB: I discovered the article that this book is based on in March of ’00. It was a Saturday and I was waiting on the downtown platform at the 77st 6 train station. It was early afternoon and I was going home from my part-time wine shop job in Yorkville. I didn’t have a novel with me and there was a day-old copy of the Times on the bench. I was skimming through the NY section and I was taken immediately. The actual article is only four brief paragraphs but I knew right away that I wanted to write about it.

  At the time I was writing my first novel, 6/2/95, which was a year away from being finished, so I cut out the article and put it in a drawer. I thought at the time I would turn it into a play but that didn’t happen for a host of reasons. After finishing, 6/2/95, I took a few months, March of ’01 till July of ’01, approximately, to work myself into an place that I thought would be a good beginning. I really wanted to write a book about child abuse that wasn’t autobiographical, so that’s where I began with Sarah, from her reaction to a shitty home life which is my how and why she became involved with Bill. I have never been even remotely interested in telling the real story of the actual participants in the article, that is absolutely none of my business, the truth really only belongs to the people involved. The article in the Times was simply a sketch and I let my imagination roll out from that point of departure. I began writing the first chapter that August, while my now wife, Johannah Rodgers, and I were staying in Door County, Wisconsin. We were there for 7 weeks and I’d wake up early every morning and work on this conversation that Sarah was having with Robert in the woods and in his father’s car.

  All of my books begin in dialog, with a simple conversation between two people, and once that is recorded all the other information, vital or otherwise, is piled on top of that dialog. The novels all begin with dialog and all of them incorporate found news items. The gestation here was very deliberate, in that I wasn’t telling a story that was autobiographical, so I was separating myself from the story while at the same time grounding what was to become Sarah in this wounded and romantic landscape.

  MCS: It doesn’t surprise me that you considered making the story into a play. In the novel, dialogue and physical descriptions (which read like stage directions at times) are braided together to create the sentence-level foundation of the novel’s structure. How do you feel your background as a playwright influenced this novel’s form?

  DB: I’m a failed actor, I came to NYC in ’89 to study acting and was thrown out of school after the first semester, however I did meet quite a few truly talented actors in school and a year or so later I founded a theater company with a handful of them, The Open Window Theater, and at first we worked out of a storefront Co-op art gallery, Brand Name Damages, in South Williamsburg where I wrote and mounted my first plays, later we moved to a converted paint factory beneath the Williamsburg Bridge where we continued putting on plays, hosting readings and bands, there was a gallery upstairs as well where local artists would show—Williamsburg was a very different place then. After doing that for a few years I left the company and slowly, really glacially, I began attempting to write fiction, because it became prohibitively expensive for me to mount my plays and I had lost my cast. My earliest attempts were published as the novella, Rockaway Wherein (Red Dust 98) but to answer your question, I’ve always tried to capture the immediacy of watching a performance on the page. That immediacy where the reader is in the moment with the present, as if the reader was watching the characters performing on stage. For an actor all his lines in a script contain cues—when A is to stand up while speaking and how A is to then cross the room with a sullen expression while proclaiming his love for B who is sitting in a chair by the window overlooking the crowded street and is secretly waiting for her lover to emerge from the subway entrance at the end of the block—the actors playing A and B need to internalize all of their objectives and to thoroughly understand what their character’s psychological motives are beneath the lines, what the real motivations are, what moves them across the room and has them proclaiming and or hiding their love. This is of course a very simple example of what Method Acting is, and by making the psychological motives visible in the dialog, and by laying out the surroundings in the dialog as well—which is obviously equally important—I think I’ve brought a heightened present, or at least more urgency, to the page..

  MCS: You accomplish a lot with such economical prose. The point of view is prismatic in the sense that the reader is made to understand the motivations and desires of multiple characters—oftentimes simultaneously. It seems that most writers find it challenging enough to convey the motivations of even just one character without compromising the complexity of another. How did you manage this?

  DB: I try to be thorough and I’ve learned to be very careful, and although it has taken a long time, I’ve finally learned how to write slowly and for myself. That was my take-away from This Young Girl Passing; you have absolutely no reason to rush writing, ideally the work will last much longer than the time it took to create, so why rush? The hordes aren’t clamoring at my door. This book took forever and way too many drafts before it became an actual book, and although at times the wait and the rejections were incredibly frustrating—in the end I’m really grateful for the struggle, as clichéd as that sounds. I spend a long time on a single page, they often take weeks to write, and then I’ll go back a few dozen times and spend twice as much time as I really should compressing text and then reintroducing the lines. Also, I tend to get bored with all the tedium that is involved with writing everyday so I’ll introduce new narrative threads within the existing lines, this resuscitates the everyday exploration of what writing a novel should be and enables me to create that prismatic point of view that you mentioned. I’ll then build out of the gaps once I remove the obvious lines and attempt to formulate a stronger foundation for the characters in the scene once the redundant has been purged and purged again.

  MCS: Your approach to time and historical context is met with a similar sense of refinement and narrative necessity. One of the defining characteristics of This Young Girl Passing is its back-and-forth movement between a post-Vietnam 1970’s and the late 90‘s (and your earlier novel, You Are Here, also moves through time within the 9/11 era). Yet it manages to avoid the entrapments of sensationalism that threaten to derail narrative. How did you inhabit both these eras in This Young Girl Passing?

  DB: When writing out the dialog for chapters I always reach a point when I need to consult the newspaper and check the weather; so I get the light right, so the moon is full or gone on the right night, to make sure it actually snowed enough to be a nuisance, and knowing what the weather was like also helps me dress the characters. I’ll go to the library and check the weather for the day before the chapter, the day of the chapter and the day after, just to be sure. At times the headlines from those dates leak in as well and that helps inform the characters dialog—sometimes it’s necessary but I’m really careful with how I use it—and it also provides the reader with a skeletal time line. However, the people I write about aren’t on the cusp of breaking news, ever, with the exception of Stefanie in You Are Here, who is last seen entering the WTC on the morning of 9/11, my characters are all very marginal and quite content to be so, they might talk about current events but only in passing—like Bill and Sarah in the hotel room talking about Hale Bopp and Heaven’s Gate—headlines are always on the peripheral.

  I’m very much into the music and culture of the 70’s, so for me, who was a teenager in the 80’s that decade represents an almost mythical time in America, and my father served in Vietnam so that war was and still is a very real part of my personal history.

  MCS: I spied on your Goodreads account, and when it comes to reading, you certainly don’t mire yourself in one literary tradition. You’re the fiction editor of Brooklyn Rail and the co-editor of its InTranslation publication which gives exposure to English translations of new international voices that might otherwise go unrecognized. How does your involvement with Brooklyn Rail impact your writing?

  DB: I’ve always been a ferocious reader since I was very young, and one of the happiest times in my life was when I read a novel a day for a 9-month period of deliberate and blissful unemployment during my mid-twenties. That was just before I began my attempts at fiction. What I’ve found with writing novels is that I cannot read them as avidly as I once did. What the Rail has allowed me to do is to ingest lots of current writing and to support it in a very public way. The work I do on behalf of the Rail and InTranslation doesn’t pay but I see it as a form of literary activism, which is a very nice way to go about doing something that you love. My work as an editor takes considerable time away from my own writing, obviously, which is at times problematic because I need to work harder at making money in order to survive in NYC, which also takes time away from my own writing, but my work as an editor has given me a greater perspective as to where my writing may or may not fit in this current publishing climate and it has enabled me work with some truly dynamic authors and publishers whom I might never have been in contact with if I’d simply stayed at my desk and toiled away in solitude.

  .

  Where Donald Breckenridge toils away in solitude

  .

  MCS: How do you manage to survive as a writer and literary activist in NYC? What does a “typical day” look like for you (if there is such a thing)?

  DB: No, no such thing as a typical day. If I can get 5 hours in a day on the novel, I know I’ll be able to face the rest of the day, and that no matter what happens it will be a good day. And if I can stay at home and write all day then it has been a fantastic day. I’ll wake up at 5 or 6 and write till 11 or noon and then get started on money work—I sell wine for a small yet prestigious wine importer. The reading and editing I do for the Rail and InTranslation takes place in the late afternoon and into the evening.

  MCS: Going back to your voracious reading habits—which writer(s) do you feel have most impacted your craft and/or your approach to writing? Who are you reading now?

  DB: The two most important authors would be the French novelists Claude Simon and Emmanuel Bove. Simon for the multiple layers and textures he brings to the page that make reading his novels (Histoire, The Flanders Road, Conducting Bodies) a nearly visceral, always urgent and wonderfully lucid experience. And Bove (My Friends, A Winter’s Journal, A Man Who Knows) for his precision, emotional honesty and pristine imagery. Also the Japanese novelists Kawabata and Soseki. And the German author, Arno Schmidt who is a tremendous writer, everyone on the planet should read Schmidt! Dalkey Archive just released a really handsome four volume set of collected works that John E Woods has translated over the years, and if you are unfamiliar with Schmidt’s work, Nobodaddy’s Children, which collects three of his early novels is an ideal place to start. And also the Brooklyn-born, Gilbert Sorrentino who is by far my favorite American author. I recently read and really enjoyed Chris Turner’s translation of Pascal Quignard’s The Roving Shadows that is a truly outstanding book and out from Seagull this month. I am currently reading Hans Fallada’s Wolf Among Wolves that Melville House published last year, also, Ahmet Hamid Tanpinar’s A Mind at Peace, one of the most elegant books that I’ve read in years, Archipelago published that a few years ago and I’m eyeing Ursula Meany Scott’s translation of Wert and the Life Without End by Claude Ollier which was just published by Dalkey Archive.

  MCS: Earlier you mentioned thwarting the tedium of writing everyday by introducing narrative threads. Friday, December 19, 1997, is a distinct passage because of its absence of dialogue. Each sentence swivels back and forth between POV to capture the (almost) simultaneous but separate experiences of Mary and Bill. Yet, the reader is rooted in the text largely due to the very idea of “pristine imagery” you just mentioned, and the movement between scenes sustains the momentum of dialogue. While crafting This Young Girl Passing, did you consciously engage with an aesthetic that would interrupt the everyday tedium of writing?

  DB: The line by line shifts in that chapter, as it finally exists are so different from a few drafts ago. Initially they had been alternating 4 to 6 sentence long scene blocks containing dramatic dialog that I stripped down in a few drafts. It was this half-formed, cathartic nonsense that I somehow felt obligated to write into the book—it was really terrible, like I was trying to wreck the novel. It works for me now because I dumped all of the false notes, everything shrill and moralistic, and all of that sentimental shit. Creating collages out of my imagery (I hesitate to call it pristine, although I try—perhaps too hard at times) on the page keeps the momentum going and at times it can suspend or stall a reader’s sense of disbelief. I wrote this book to music from the era, watched most of the films advertised in the newspapers from the days the chapters were taken while writing those chapters, studied the history of the era, so not really, other than editing the fiction in the Rail on a monthly basis, putting together the fiction anthology that Hanging Loose published in ’06 and curating a monthly reading series at the Central Branch of the Brooklyn Public Library from ’02-’08, my head was always in this book. That is until I couldn’t find a home for it, almost lost my mind, and then wrote You Are Here . This Young Girl Passing didn’t have a publisher until July of 2007, I was shopping around You Are Here, having just finished that. Both books got picked up that summer, which was a huge relief, because I was really dreading having two unpublished novels.

  MCS: People who saw me reading your book in public asked me about its title, and I would respond with an imprudent amount of speculative gibberish. I swore that I would never ask this question for an interview, but I’m compelled to ask for this novel in particular—how did you settle on the title This Young Girl Passing? Would you be willing to share any working titles you rejected?

  DB: The title is from the epigraph which is taken from Eugene Ionesco’s Present Past Past Present. Eugene Ionesco is one of my favorite authors. Each one of my novels and the novella, Rockaway Wherein, contains an epigraph from that book. What I tried to say with This Young Girl Passing, ultimately, is that the past we’ve accumulated, and cultivated is the same past we will into our present. We are predetermined to live in a present where the past resonates around us endlessly, and I learned that from reading Eugene Ionesco. The working title for the novel and the title that I shopped around for a few years when this book was a disaster was Arabesques for Sauquoit as I thought that spoke to the way it was written and the location, Sauquoit, where the novel takes place.

  MCS: What’s next?

  DB: I’m currently working on my fourth novel. I started it in the winter of ’09 and I have about a 100 manuscript pages that might be ok. It’s been slow as You Are Here came out while I was writing it and that was very distracting. My father got really sick in the spring of ’10 and then he died that September which was really brutal as we were very close. Incidentally, he is buried near the farm where he was raised which is in the same county where This Young Girl Passing takes place. Getting this book ready for publication was also incredibly distracting, in a good way, and that kept me away from the new novel, but now, finally, I can begin again in earnest!

  — by Mary Stein and Donald Breckenridge

• Believer - https://logger.believermag.com/post/donald-breckenridge

  Quoted in Sidelights: “I think my embrace of Bove, Simon and Sarraute has a lot to do with the fact that I discovered them myself,” Breckenridge told Believer online interviewer Martin Riker. “I am self-taught so my reading—like my attempts at storytelling—has always been unsupervised and I don’t know how conscious I was in making this choice when I began writing, you know, what deeply unsentimental angle to approach it from.”
  After the Nouveau Roman: an Interview with Donald Breckenridge
  June 19, 2017
  Donald Breckenridge
  Donald Breckenridge

  What most immediately impresses me about Donald Breckenridge’s novel And Then is how remote his predecessors are from our contemporary moment, yet how immediate the book feels regardless. Most writers form themselves in relation to more or less familiar contemporary figures (David Foster Wallace’s legacy seems particularly large in younger writers these days, for example), with the result that, for better and for worse, readers immediately see where they are. But Breckenridge cut his teeth on more distant literary traditions—largely foreign, specifically French—which makes his writing wonderfully strange, both in its challenges and its gratifications.

  And Then is a book about death and haunting. It is an oddly but subtly constructed dance of storylines that only tangentially overlap—some more tangentially than others—organized around resonances between the stories, ideas or feelings that haunt the book through recurrence. One storyline follows a young woman, Suzanne, who becomes involved in a small town crime and ends up in New York, where she drifts through the art world but gets “mixed up with the wrong people” and disappears. Another follows a student in New York years later housesitting for a professor who’d once been Suzanne’s roommate. A third is an autobiographical account of Breckenridge’s father’s health problems and eventual death. The book is a brilliant example of dramatic restraint, building characters and complexities gradually and quietly, ultimately coming together with unexpected coherence and effect.

  Donald Breckenridge is the author of three previous novels as well as being the fiction editor of the Brooklyn Rail, co-curator of the website InTranslation—which features works-in-progress by translators around the world—and most recently managing editor of Red Dust, a landmark small publisher focusing on, among other things, mid-20th Century French writers. I interviewed him by email in late May 2017.

  —Martin Riker

  THE BELIEVER: The introduction you wrote for NYRBooks’ most recent Emmanuel Bove translation starts by calling Bove a “master of hyper-objectivity” and goes on to cite his influence on Nouveau Roman writers Claude Simon and Nathalie Sarraute. In the tradition of establishing lineage, I want to start by asking what you mean by hyper-objectivity and what this literary value—maybe in particular as it relates to the Nouveau Roman—has meant for you in your own work?

  DONALD BRECKENRIDGE: By hyper-objectivity I mean that everything is equally relevant and yet you have to do a lot more with much less. Emmanuel Bove's writing is incredibly rapid and deceptively simple—especially in the early books. He is always direct in thought and expression and possesses a cinematographers' eye for detail and composition. He has extraordinary empathy for his characters and that gives them an immediate timeworn granite-like substance, but they are never portrayed in a sentimental light. He is unforgiving and yet he is never malicious or unnecessarily cruel. You get this profound sense of decency while reading his books, and that lingers.

  I think Claude Simon shares many of Boves' abilities—that hyper-objectivity. Bove and Simon certainly have a similar eye for composition and a richness of detail although Simon's sentences do occasionally run on for pages. Unlike Bove he can be deliberately and beautifully opaque when it serves the narrative. His finest books possess an incredibly vivid rapidity. Simon is forever present. He employs a breathtaking mechanization of multiple narratives that are in constant motion. Whereas Sarraute and her microtonal interiors, her deft observations and deliberate silences lend a nearly bottomless depth to her close narratives, which is also something that you find in Bove's writing. Her dialogue is also incredibly precise and remarkably urgent so if you listen closely to her work you might hear a muffled yet determined beating heart.

  Reading Bove taught me how to write fiction. In my early twenties he opened a door that I did not know existed and that enabled me to consider the possibility that maybe one day I could put something down on the page that someone else might be interested in reading.

  BLVR: The thing is we don’t see many contemporary writers coming out of that tradition (Nouveau Roman/hyper-objectivity), and if I had to make a guess why, I would say it's because as a culture we’re very drama-oriented, and hyper-objectivity in some ways resists the dramatic.

  DB: Yes, this hyper-objective approach does willfully resist the flourishes of typical commercial American storytelling. Also the authors who have influenced me, the western European ones we’ve been discussing at least, are way out of fashion in academia and as a result of that, they are not being taught in schools so aspiring writers are not being exposed to them. Bove’s work literally vanished after he died, and while he has had a few revivals both here and in France, the vast majority of American readers who would actually really love his work if they were given an opportunity to read him might not ever get that chance. Many of Claude Simon’s finest novels are long out of print so how is a professor going to assign those books? And the same can be said for Natalie Sarraute.

  I think my embrace of Bove, Simon and Sarraute has a lot to do with the fact that I discovered them myself. I am self-taught so my reading—like my attempts at storytelling—has always been unsupervised and I don’t know how conscious I was in making this choice when I began writing, you know, what deeply unsentimental angle to approach it from.

  BLVR: And Then goes about making these emotional/narrative spaces in its own ways. For example through simultaneity, which occurs both within individual sentences ("Suzanne was sitting beside John in his VW, "All I want to do," with a six-pack nestled between her handled feet, "is get out of here") and on the level of time: the simultaneous occurrence, in the narrative, of stories from different decades. What is it about your concept for And Then that made simultaneity the organizing principle?

  DB: I wanted the reader to be aware of the present at all times, or rather, I wanted to present the characters to the reader as they existed in their own time and to make the reader a compliant witness while the characters and their multiple stories reverberate throughout the book.

  All the stories in And Then share similar themes of abandonment, dissipation, and regret. The stories with Tom and Suzanne both happen in the same place a little over a decade apart. Outside of the individual scenes, as the book quickly shifts through the decades, I think that the multiplicity of stories and their similar themes lend themselves to this simultaneity.

  BLVR: On the surface it makes me think of Joseph Frank’s idea of spatial form. Frank's thesis as I remember it is that Modernism was the move from a linear to a spatial experience—Woolf and Joyce and the plumpness of a single moment rather than a thin linearity. What’s different here is that you have this coexistence of different times within the same space, and they perforate one another (both through thematic recurrences and, within the narrative, the presence of ghosts).

  DB: That is exactly right. It is like having a pair of retrospective eyes contained within your own eyes. This multiplicity of juxtaposed narratives as a swollen slightly off-kilter double vision. When I started visualizing this book back in ’08, when I set out to create a novel that was going to act as a buffer for myself from what I knew was going to be the last few years of my father’s life, I was carrying around this sentence, “The vertigo of failure on a grey felt blackboard,” for months while trying to figure out what that would actually look like—maybe it was circuitous, was it a vortex, what would a vertigo of failure sound like, it could reverberate but very quietly, and how on earth could that possibly become a narrative? I gradually came up with that scene of a young Tom playing in the snow when he discovers a body on the shore. A few weeks later I realized that the vertigo of failure was the infinity symbol—two joined circles—on a grey felt blackboard and that is how Suzanne and Tom eventually came to share the same apartment at different points in time, and that is why her spirit returned to that place to visit him because he was the person who discovered her body on the shore.

  BLVR: And Then ends up being a ghost story both literally and structurally. When the ghost—two of them, actually, in different storylines—arrive toward the end, they provide a vehicle for the larger concept that the various narratives haunt each other, or echo each other (depending on whether you are the in the narrative of the haunting or of the echoing). Early on in And Then you recount the plot of a film (Jean Rouch’s 1965 Gare du Nord), and unlike other strains in the narrative, this particular piece never circles back, and yet it seems to stand as a sort of theme out of which the other strains are variations. Was the idea that the film establishes an Ur-story or premise that hangs over the book, or is it rather the disappearance of that narrative that matters most to you? Or it’s the presence of an absence—another ghost.

  DB: Appropriating the Gare du Nord narrative provided me with an overture for Tom and Suzanne’s stories. So the principal overlying themes of the novel are in that sequence but have absolutely nothing to do with the characters of the book. It’s like a short before the main feature that was made by a different director who happens to be working under a similar banner in another country during an earlier era.

  BLVR: As you mentioned earlier, there’s also, running adjacent to these adjacent-running narratives, the autobiographical story of your own father’s death. The danger of including such charged memoir material, it seems to me, is that the memoir will assume the role of primary narrative, to which everything else is window dressing. And Then avoids this but I’m not sure I can articulate exactly how.

  DB: If I had approached the autobiographical narrative with a sensational or self-pitying tone, I think that would have destroyed the book. What happened to my father in And Then is exactly how he chose to live and how he chose to end his life after an ugly protracted fight with cancer. Witnessing that was my reality for decades, and while I wouldn’t want to see him suffering anymore, I would cut off my left hand immediately if that meant I could spend another afternoon hanging out with him—playing cards and smoking his cigarettes. I know that sounds sensational and melodramatic and I suppose it is but so be it.

  What I set out to do with And Then was to create a book that would act as a filter while witnessing the end of his very deliberate demise. I wanted to write through what I strongly suspected would be his last few years. I began the book in the winter of 2008 and he died in September of 2010. Tom and Suzanne counter-mingling in that East Village apartment was my ballast. I finished the book in ’12 and the publication was delayed for awhile. It was during that time, the summer of ’13, that the autobiographical narrative took shape—telling my father’s story. I somehow acquired the courage to attempt it, and what you see in the book, parts of that were actually taken from the eulogy I wrote for his funeral. So you get this emotionally honest and urgent yet really clear-eyed autobiographical take that I wove into the fictional narratives and everything sort of alternates and reverberates like a souped up jalopy.

  BLVR: Do you find these two kinds of writing (autobiographical and fictional) very different? This is a novel and in a sense you have fiction in fiction and reality in fiction. Is reality in fiction more real than fiction in fiction, or are they both just different translations of life?

  DB: The autobiographical and fictional are very different and yet I think they compliment each other so yes, they are simply different translations of life, that’s a nice way of putting it. This book was inspired by an actual encounter with the ghost of a recent suicide whose spirit or life force passed through me late one night in the spring of ’06 and the novel I spun from that extraordinary interaction was my filter through which I experienced the death of my father. All of it was process—none less realized—this was a clear-eyed awakening and a supreme act of love.

  BLVR: Before we wrap up—you do a lot of other work in the literary community—you’re a good literary citizen—and I want to make sure we talk about that. As fiction editor for the Brooklyn Rail you founded InTranslation, a web space for translators to share works in progress. Why did you focus in on translation in particular? What was your goal in starting this site and has the goal changed over the years?

  DB: Jen Zoble and I founded the site (10 years ago!) because we wanted to publish a lot more work in translation than I had monthly page space for in the fiction section of the Brooklyn Rail—which has always been very translation heavy—and to give translators a web-based bulletin board so they could showcase their sample translations in progress to hopefully attract the attention of editors, potential publishers and readers that are interested in literature in translation. I’ve always been a reader of literature in translation, nearly exclusively, and yet I’m seemingly incapable of reading or speaking any languages aside from English, so my work there has been a natural progression of that interest.

  BLVR: You’re also now working with Red Dust Books. What's ahead for Red Dust? While I’m at it, what's ahead for Donald Breckenridge?

  DB: In my capacity as managing editor of Red Dust we published a novella by Emmanuel Bove, A Raskolnikoff, that Mitchell Abidor did a remarkable job of translating and we’ve two books forthcoming this fall: Alyson Waters’ translation of I Am Not a Hero by Pierre Autin-Grenier and also Jonathan Larson’s translation of Francis Ponge’s Nioque of the Early Spring. Both books are really extraordinary. I’m trying to get the review copies out by mid-July with an October or early November pub date.

  In my own writing I’m slowly working on a retelling of the Sophocles’ Theban plays and that has been incredibly challenging and also very rewarding.

  Martin Riker’s fiction and criticism have appeared in publications including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, London Review of Books, Conjunctions, and The Baffler. His novel Samuel Johnson’s Eternal Return will be published in 2018.

• David R. Godine, Publisher - http://www.godine.com/2017/04/19/conversation-donald-breckenridge/

  april 19, 2017 by intern
  Conversation with Donald Breckenridge
  Intern Nancy discusses inspiration, his new book, and more with our new Black Sparrow author.

  One of our new Black Sparrow titles, And Then by Donald Breckenridge refreshes the traditional ghost story with dynamic interwoven narratives and direct language that subverts the typical suspense of the genre to contemplative tension. The hauntings explored in the novel go beyond encounters with strangers who have passed to become ghosts and those fleeting moments that are nestled within our memories. An engaging read with the crisp emotional clarity of an unaffected narrative, And Then is a succinct read that leaves you feeling fulfilled.

  Donald Breckenridge is the author of four novels and the editor of two fiction anthologies. He also engages in editorial work as the Fiction Editor of the Brooklyn Rail, the Co-Founder and Co-Editor of InTranslation, and the Managing Editor of Red Dust Books.

  Your career thus far seems deeply involved in the literary world, from writing novels to editorial work with the Brooklyn Rail, InTranslation, and Red Dust Books. As you started your career, did you see yourself as a writer first or an editor?

  Writing fiction evolved out of writing plays and that was something that grew out of my interest in acting. When I came to New York at twenty I was deeply involved with the theater, I helped found a small company in South Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and then gradually, when financial and aesthetic necessity began to dictate otherwise, I cautiously drifted into fiction. I say cautiously because I had almost no confidence in my ability to write fiction, and while writing dialogue and blocking for the stage came easily, especially in a youthful and wildly open collaborative environment, writing fiction was and still is a highly challenging route. Then about six months before my first novel was published, when I was thirty-three, I became very close with a few editors and the publisher at the Brooklyn Rail just when they decided that they wanted to publish fiction on a regular basis. I was asked to come on board and since it was guaranteed that I would have complete control over the content of the section I readily agreed. Until that point I never had the slightest intention of becoming an editor although I have always been an avid reader. So when I began at the Rail I saw myself as an aspiring writer simply posing as an editor who was positively determined to give back to the community by publishing work by other young ascending authors, older authors who at one point in their careers might have been successful from a commercial standpoint who were now being neglected by larger publishing houses and subsequently shunned by smaller independent houses, so-called experimental literature, and of course, world literature in translation which has always been my principal focus as a reader, my first love, and where I derive nearly all of my influences as a writer. At the time I expected that my involvement with the Rail would capture a moment, a very brief moment in time, that I would eventually outgrow this posturing then drift away from editing. Of course the exact opposite has happened; I have been at the Rail for sixteen years now, InTranslation, the journal I founded with Jen Zoble, turns ten years old this April, and my involvement with Red Dust, Joanna Gunderson, who founded Red Dust in 1962 and ran it for decades by herself, published my first novella in ’98, is only really just beginning.

  That seems like a very fruitful way to connect to a creative environment and community, especially since fictional prose does not often have the same outlets as theater. I think the examples that can be found in literary history also make writing seem like a very solitary process, so editorial work does seem like a communal extension to that task. Do you find that your playwriting and editorial work influence your novels?

  You are absolutely correct, writing fiction is an incredibly solitary process, which is one of the things that I really enjoy about it. Although on occasion it is a pretty good idea to leave the desk and brave the great outdoors. To be honest one of the hardest things for me when I was involved in the theater was being so exposed, it was nearly always too much, on stage or not, as I have never been very comfortable in my own skin. Being an editor and an author is a lot like being in the world but not quite being of the world. Editing and writing are both highly selective; you take your sweet time while you pick and choose. It is important to never rush. When working with a writer I always try to be as non-intrusive as possible. I’ve never aspired to be a tastemaker or a trendsetter. I’ve nearly always found ambitious writers, artists in general but writers in particular, to be incredibly dull self-absorbed imbecilic clowns. When I find a singular story, or a stand alone chapter, or a book that works brilliantly or has the potential to work brilliantly I want it, I have to have it; and if I’m lucky enough to get my paws on it I’ll do everything in my power to make it perfect. I can be incredibly harsh with my own work and occasionally that turns out to be a detriment but more often than not that is what saves the book. And finally, my technique of imbedding dialogue while cementing characterization around a character while they navigate a moment on the page is something I’ve adapted from writing plays:

  “You boil a few medium-sized potatoes,” Russell had finished cooking them, “the red ones,” when Tom returned from the bodega. “Make sure you leave the skins on,” Russell emptied the pot into the colander, “the flavor is in the skins,” and steam rose from the sink. Tom removed two cold forties of Ballantine from the brown paper bag, “Here you go,” placed one on the counter, “the sour cream and butter is in the bag.” And Then (page 70)

  The imbedded dialogue technique does add immediacy to the scenes. I think it also adds a sense of transience that feels very lived in. It’s exciting to read and clearly a benefit from having been involved in theater! I also admire the way you approach acquisitions. It can be tough for authors to find publishers that want to take a chance on their writing, but your energetic appeals really speak to your enthusiasm for reading and providing good books to read. You mentioned that translated works are very important to you. Do you read in languages other than English? How do foreign books find their way into your influences? Ionesco, for instance, is the epigraph to And Then.

  I can only read English. I was born with the wrong genes when it comes to learning other languages, unless it is a wine list, only then am I truly multi-lingual. I became a voracious reader in my early teens, and world literature has always been extremely important to me. Much of And Then is a cumulative response to the work of Claude Simon, who has always been one of my heroes. Simon, thanks to Richard Howard, Jordan Stump, Helen R Lane and Jim Cross’ stellar translations, really illuminated the multiplicity of roles and possibilities a novel can accomplish while telling a compelling story. His masterful ability to explode fragmentary narratives into gorgeous mosaics while still retaining their overall push through the plot while his characters continue their gradual evolution is something that I never grow weary of reading. Also, Eugene Ionesco, his writing touched me when I was in my early teens and reading Ionesco, not just the plays but his fiction, and most importantly, his journals, helped me understand the limitations and possibilities not only of language but of existence as well. I have found the epigraphs for all of my books in the pages of Ionesco’s memoir Present Past, Past Present.

  Navigating a wine list is a good skill to have; an even better one is navigating the possibilities of world literatures. There seem to be an abundance of voices that you channel into your works. Can you expand a little more on how And Then is a response to Claude Simon?

  Yesterday I was visiting John Reed’s class at the New School, where I had been invited to talk to his students about how to go about submitting fiction to editors at literary publications, anyway, after the class a few of his students asked me about my forthcoming novel, and when they commented on how much they liked the title, And Then, I informed them that I had taken it from Soseki’s masterpiece of the same name. This would be the Norma Moore Field translation that Perigee Books published in ’82, and that Tuttle recently brought back into print. Natsume Soseki is another writer whose work, and I have to confess that he is one of a half dozen authors obviously including Claude Simon, is someone that I am always returning to and responding to in my fiction. All of Soseki’s protagonists share a sense of discomfort with their world, maybe exquisitely cautious dislocation is a better way of putting it, what Soseki does with dislocation is truly extraordinary, that nearly constant sense of cautious unease with the present is so expertly crafted and effortless. I have stolen the title from his novel And Then, but I owe his book To the Spring Equinox and Beyond (translated by Kingo Ochiai and Sanford Goldstein, Tuttle Classics ’85) a massive debt as one of the main story lines in And Then is a response to that absolute gem. So anyway, while I was on the subway on my way home from the New School last night after this class I was thinking about your request to expand a bit more on the writing of Claude Simon in relation to my own paltry attempts at writing fiction and I’ve decided to respectfully decline to elaborate any further on the matter of influences. Believe me, I can go on and on about the writers who have influenced my work all afternoon, and I do greatly appreciate your questions, and maybe I’m being coy but in this case I think tossing a few bread crumbs on the path might be better than leaving you a tidy trail of stones.

  That’s just fine! You gave me a thorough response, and I think there’s more than enough room for guesswork and intrigue in your answers. It’s good to leave some mystery in the process, and it leaves room for discussing And Then. It seems from the introduction that And Then is partially autobiographical. What was the emotional process of working on the novel like? The candid emotional discussions about dealing with life’s transience were particularly powerful to me as a reader. Was writing this novel cathartic in anyway?

  Initially I wanted to write a ghost story about two people who occupied the same apartment at different points in time, to examine their possible connections and similarities while alternating the story lines—as the one who first occupies the space returns to haunt the one who comes later—while living through what I strongly suspected to be the last few years of my father’s life. I had actually encountered a ghost in the spring of ’06 and my intention was for this ghost story, inspired by actual events, to be informed by what I was experiencing with my father, it was to be my filter, and my plan was to keep the impending trauma at arms-length while gradually processing it through this ghost story. I began the book in earnest in the early spring of ’09 and my father passed away in the fall of ’10. I finished the book in the spring of ’13 and actually placed it that fall with Ted Pelton at Starcherone. He agreed to take the book but told me that he wouldn’t be able to publish it until the fall of ’15. So the story had served it’s purpose, and although it was complete and would soon be published, somehow a sideways confidence gradually overcame me in the summer of ’13, and I found myself writing out the last few months of my father’s life, describing how things ended for him, the where and how of why he chose to die, then going back further and really examining our relationship. Unblinking. I wanted to honestly describe this landscape of living memory. Everything in And Then that happened to my father is true. Everything that happened to me in this book is also true. My father and I were very close friends. What happened to him is just as what you’ve read in the book. It was an ugly and brutal way for someone to die. Writing out the 3rd part of the book, this autobiographical section was extremely painful and also wildly nostalgic in the best possible way. And yet he is still gone and I think of him everyday. I’m very grateful for the time we had together. I never suspected I would have the courage much less the ability to actually tell our story. So the initial ghost story became a stage for what gradually became the autobiographical section of the book, and finally, I wove all three sections together so now there are three alternating narratives instead of two.

  Your dedication to recording the end of your father’s life and your understanding of the situation is apparent in the text. The ending, too, is matter-of-fact but sensitive. You leave the reader with a sense of closure without attempting to flourish. The image of the ghost is also well rendered! Is there a scene in the book that you enjoy rereading the most or that you feel most satisfied with how you wrote it?

  I think that the Gare du Nord opening for the book works well to set a tone for what is to come, it is also a very concise narrative summary of an extraordinary work of art. That was an absolute pleasure to write. When I read out I tend to open with that, so much so that most of the people who have seen me read out in the last few years are growing a bit weary of hearing it. And I’m really happy that you like the way the ghost came off. That was a really incredible experience, it opened up an entire world of new possibilities, although not everyone believes me when I tell them about it. I think people who have encountered ghosts can relate to that moment whereas people who haven’t actually had that experience think that I might have lost my mind, or that I am spinning them a really convoluted yarn. Have you ever encountered a ghost? Generally feeling satisfied with what I have done is a giant red flag—a sure sign that something is horribly wrong with what I’m attempting—although there are a respectable number of places in the book that became high points when I completed them. Passages where the writing serves as a standard for what comes next. I’ve tried to pitch all the half-baked telling, the neon-illuminated characterizations and all the dull explications into the trash. Perhaps that is why the book is only 100 pages long. Which is probably a perfect length for me.

  I wouldn’t say that I’ve encountered a ghost, but I’ve had ghostly events happen that I can’t attribute to anything else. It really makes you less skeptical when you’ve seen or experienced events that you can’t quite explain. Do you anticipate exploring ghostly themes or spiritual storylines in future works? It seems to have made a strong and positive impact on your writing. Perhaps there are more possibilities from here.

  As a massive fan of Poe, Wilkie Collins, Nerval, Arthur Machen, Gautier, and J S LeFanu the realm of the supernatural has always captivated me on the page. I’ve always appreciated the genre but I wasn’t someone who believed—it was a device, atmospheric coloring, suspenseful sepia from another century and when used effectively by a master like Machen the end results were always profound—and even if I did believe I would certainly never even entertain the idea of confessing it in public. Is the Easter Bunny next? No, my worldview was far too steeped in the concrete and existential calamities of this toxic century, justifiably cynical, but yes, to answer your question, absolutely. The fantastic and spiritual are new vocabularies, doors are always opening and if the walls don’t cave when you put your back into them then they are probably easy to climb, and hopefully I’ll eventually learn how to incorporate them effectively into other writing projects.

  Those sound like exciting prospects to me. Ghost stories and the supernatural have a broad potential for creating different atmospheres and stories. Is there anything else about And Then that you would like potential readers to know or keep in mind as they approach the novel?

  I think that’s it.

  Tagged and then, author interview, black sparrow, donald breckenridge

And Then
Publishers Weekly.
264.13 (Mar. 27, 2017): p71+.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
And Then
Donald Breckenridge. Black Sparrow, $16.95
trade paper (104p) ISBN 978-1-57423-229-5
In this crisp, fragmented novel, Breckenridge (This Young Girl Passing) captures the dwelling of lost souls
in living minds. Told in short vignettes out a few loosely connected characters, the book hopscotches over a
span of four decades. Suzanne, escaping from Virginia to New York in the '70s, meets a photographer
named Brian in Washington Square, a place that confirms a "part of the city's mythology Suzanne was eager
to embrace." Their relationship is tortured, and Suzanne disappears after Brian discovers track marks on her
arm. A writer, also from Virginia, tells of the degeneration of his father's health, culminating in his refusing
treatment in 2008 and the writer being helpless to do anything but apply "band-aids to what became the
lethal skull infection that killed him." Back in the '80s, a college student, Tom, house-sits for his professor,
who was Suzanne's first roommate. He discovers some of Brian's photographs of Suzanne, and is visited by
a ghost that leaves behind a "warm, human dampness." Every character is similarly haunted (the writer by
his father, Suzanne by her mother's abandonment), and introducing the supernatural into his compact,
propulsive tales allows Breckenridge to string a single emotional thread between the harder-to-track shifts
in character and time. That unified feeling, however, is grim. "To have a ghost," Tom remarks, "death is
essential." (May)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"And Then." Publishers Weekly, 27 Mar. 2017, p. 71+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A487928083/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ad644830.
Accessed 24 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A487928083
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Quoted in Sidelights: Written in non-linear episodes, with a
distinctive style that mixes dialogue and exposition in a challenging but often beautiful way, Breckenridge draws us deep into a bond that spans adult- and childhood,” remarked Brooklyn Rail contributor Jeff McConaghy. “In negotiating this fraught terrain, perhaps his greatest feat is that he doesn’t take sides. The prose is scrupulously objective.”
Confounding expectations at every turn,
Breckenridge challenges the reader to engage an unconventional love story on its own terms,
This young girl passing
Jeff McConaghy
The Brooklyn Rail.
(Jan. 2013): p56.
COPYRIGHT 2013 The Brooklyn Rail, Inc.
http://www.brooklynrail.org
Full Text:
Donald Breckenridge, This Young Girl Passing (Autonomedia, 2011)
The year is 1976. Vietnam is stagnating, the kids are smoking homegrown, and high school French teacher
Bill Richardson keeps a long-legged junior named Sarah after class to discuss her failing grade. He offers to
drive her home, instead taking her to a secluded lake where they begin an illicit relationship that lasts a year
and a half. Most nights they have sex on the daybed in Bill's home office, his wife Mary zonked on sleeping
pills upstairs. Rumor is that Sarah, who was raped at 14 at her cousin's wedding, whose unemployed father
beats her until he breaks bones, isn't the first one.
The year is 1996. Hale-Bopp is flying by, taking or leaving the souls of the Heaven's Gate cult, and Bill is
going gray at the same job, in the same passionless marriage. Sarah is a Prozac-taking mother of a teenage
daughter, cheating on her husband with her dentist boss. They run into each other near the Riverside Mall,
get a drink, and start another affair, meeting in the seedy motels of Utica for sex and conversation.
Donald Breckenridge's short but powerful third novel is something of a moral litmus test--an unorthodox
love story that challenges the reader to look beyond the facts. Written in non-linear episodes, with a
distinctive style that mixes dialogue and exposition in a challenging but often beautiful way, Breckenridge
draws us deep into a bond that spans adult- and childhood. In negotiating this fraught terrain, perhaps his
greatest feat is that he doesn't take sides. The prose is scrupulously objective, drawing us in not with
Humbert Humbert-style wooing, but rather a sort of apologia via description. An accumulation of fine detail
complicating and obscuring in delightful and surprising ways.
Breckenridge found the inspiration for This Young Girl Passing in a March 2000 article in the New York
Times about a teacher in upstate New York dismissed for having a relationship with a student 20 years prior.
The relationship came to light when the couple rekindled their affair. Breckenridge adopts the basic facts,
but it's interesting to note what he omits. Though brief, the article mentions that the teacher fondled the
student in class--a salacious detail that would have been featured in a typical ripped-from-the-headlines
book, but which is noticeably absent here. Absent too, are any real sex scenes, many sections fading in just
after the act, catching the couple as they try, valiantly if unsuccessfully, to communicate.
We feel the tragedy of the situation most during these conversations. Bill endlessly asking for honesty while
himself living a lie. Sarah giving herself again and again, in as many ways as she can, to a man who is
unwilling to leave even a childless, unhappy marriage. Though it's clear in these pages that Bill is at least a
bit of an ass, we begin to feel the real criminal is the finiteness of experience--the very fact that as time
passes certain unhappy men will encounter certain unhappy girls. Fault, even volition, hardly enters into it.
The reader can be forgiven if, during these long, winding exchanges--surely influenced by Breckenridge's
theater background, complete with stage cues--they root for this couple to some extent. If only for some
brief happiness. As soon as their love begins to become idealized, however, Bill asks a particularly pertinent
question: "If we had married do you think we would still be happy?"
This Young Girl Passing is a slim work that asks big questions. Confounding expectations at every turn,
Breckenridge challenges the reader to engage an unconventional love story on its own terms, making us
almost wish our lives were this beautifully fucked up.
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McConaghy, Jeff
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
McConaghy, Jeff. "This young girl passing." The Brooklyn Rail, Jan. 2013, p. 56. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A353645411/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=328c8a21.
Accessed 24 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A353645411
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Donald Breckenridge. You Are Here
Stefanie Sobelle
The Review of Contemporary Fiction.
29.2 (Summer 2009): p348+.
COPYRIGHT 2009 Review of Contemporary Fiction
http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/review
Full Text:
Donald Breckenridge. You Are Here. Starcherone Books, 2008. 144 pp. Paper: $16.00.
Most 9/11 novels fall into the trap of attempting to narrate that day or manipulate its consequences. Donald
Breckenridge's slim, stylish, and seductive third novel, You Are Here, never directly mentions 9/11, but
rather confronts the fundamental problem of composing a 9/11 novel--that doing so turns events into just
another story. Its premise is deceptively simple: A married architect has an affair with a younger,
unemployed woman in New York in the months leading up to 9/11; later, a middle-aged woman, Janet,
begins a relationship with a twenty-four-year-old writer she meets while shopping for used books. Both
forms of the May-September romance are doomed, as predicted by major twenty-first century news items
buzzing in the background--presidential elections, a battle in Iraq, the disappearance of a congressman's
mistress. What makes this novel particularly innovative is Breckenridge's clever dialogue, which he
interpolates into description so that the two occur simultaneously, even when they are at a chronological
distance. For example, a casual conversation between Janet and her lover is interrupted by memories of her
former marriage: " 'Have you been?' Mark was of average intelligence, 'in Beacon ...' dishonest and
manipulative, 'no I haven't,' and often believed his own lies, 'I hear it's very impressive.'" The young writer
documents Janet, who then becomes a character both in the novel we are reading and in the text he is
composing. Meticulously tracking the vintages of the wines characters drink and alluding to New Yorkspecific
sites like Pete's Candy Store and The Strand, Breckenridge emphasizes that every layer of personal
experience--including the shops in which we buy our books--is another composition. A first-person narrator,
Donald, presents himself as the writer composing the characters as we read them, a further reminder of the
fictionality of fiction. As the architect claims, people behave "[i]n the roles they're expected to perform." In
the end, his ill-fated girlfriend escapes their affair through a job that links her story to the headlines. The
intimacy of her portrayal shows Breckenridge's finesse in handling both the imperative to reconcile personal
and public tragedy through writing, and the impossibility of its fulfillment.
Sobelle, Stefanie
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Sobelle, Stefanie. "Donald Breckenridge. You Are Here." The Review of Contemporary Fiction, vol. 29, no.
2, 2009, p. 348+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A207061444/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=a1950c3a. Accessed 24 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A207061444
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Quoted in Sidelights: “chiseled to Carveresque precision,” "This is hardly a happy read–love is fleeting; passion consuming–but it is an absorbing study in how in finding each other we make
inevitable our own loneliness.”
Donald Breckenridge. This Young Girl
Passing
Joseph Dewey
The Review of Contemporary Fiction.
32.1 (Spring 2012): p281+.
COPYRIGHT 2012 Review of Contemporary Fiction
http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/review
Full Text:
Donald Breckenridge. This Young Gift Passing . Unbearable Books, 2011. 102 pp. Paper: $12.00.
Post-postmodern writers intrigued by the fractal dynamics of love and lust but raised within the oppressive
penumbra of reality shows, chick flicks, and prime time drama-dies must surely wrestle with how to
redecorate the stale clichés of relationships. But as Donald Breckenridge so powerfully shows in this dense,
understated anatomy of obsession, you don't need to redecorate them at all. There is something scalped,
honest about those clichés. His characters, trapped within toxic relationships and struggling to express the
complicated urgency of their self-destructive hungers, resort to clichés at those critical moments when
obsession clarifies into action, clichés that here become poignant, painful, and achingly honest. A highschool
French teacher in upstate New York, mired in a contented marriage, falls under the tonic spell of a
precocious student, a woman-child, the victim of parental abuse and herself the object of a classmate's
tender obsession. Breckenridge gives that intrigue an underplayed density by deftly counterpointing the
initial relationship in the late 1970s against the chance encounter (and consequent reanimation of the affair)
nearly twenty years later. She is now married (although she has never stopped obsessing over the teacher)
and has a grown daughter of her own, who is as well navigating through a problematic relationship with a
misfit classmate whose parents' marriage is itself floundering amid charged infidelities. It is, given the
novel's narrow scale, an ambitious scope. But the prose is chiseled to Carveresque precision, tectonic
emotions revealed by spare conversations (Breckenridge is an accomplished playwright), telling details,
complex gestures, lingering silences, and the occasional pointed pop-culture referent. This is hardly a happy
read--love is fleeting; passion consuming--but it is an absorbing study in how in finding each other we make
inevitable our own loneliness.
Dewey, Joseph
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Dewey, Joseph. "Donald Breckenridge. This Young Girl Passing." The Review of Contemporary Fiction,
vol. 32, no. 1, 2012, p. 281+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A298411747/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4b4e10a5.
Accessed 24 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A298411747
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You Are Here
Small Press Bookwatch.
(May 2009):
COPYRIGHT 2009 Midwest Book Review
http://www.midwestbookreview.com
Full Text:
You Are Here
Donald Breckenridge
Starcherone
PO Box 303, Buffalo, NY 14201
9780978881184, $16.00, www.starcherone.com
With so many actors on the stage, something is bound to happen. "You Are Here" is a wide-view novel of a
New York City Theatre troop as they prepare for a one-act play. Written in a fine style unique to author
Donald Breckenridge but very pleasing to read, "You Are Here" paints a wide picture of theatre and is
highly entertaining. "You Are Here" is very much recommended for anyone searching for literary fiction.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"You Are Here." Small Press Bookwatch, May 2009. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A199588779/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5b430003.
Accessed 24 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A199588779

"And Then." Publishers Weekly, 27 Mar. 2017, p. 71+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A487928083/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 24 Dec. 2017. McConaghy, Jeff. "This young girl passing." The Brooklyn Rail, Jan. 2013, p. 56. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A353645411/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 24 Dec. 2017. Sobelle, Stefanie. "Donald Breckenridge. You Are Here." The Review of Contemporary Fiction, vol. 29, no. 2, 2009, p. 348+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A207061444/ITOF? u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 24 Dec. 2017. Dewey, Joseph. "Donald Breckenridge. This Young Girl Passing." The Review of Contemporary Fiction, vol. 32, no. 1, 2012, p. 281+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A298411747/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 24 Dec. 2017. "You Are Here." Small Press Bookwatch, May 2009. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A199588779/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 24 Dec. 2017.

• Necessary Fiction
  http://necessaryfiction.com/reviews/AndThenbyDonaldBreckenridge
  Word count: 1204

  Quoted in Sidelights: “a haunting collage that is both melancholy and without solace” and Breckenridge “a truly original stylist.” He concluded: “So much is hidden in the smallest detail, that And Then presents a layered experience for readers—one they will linger on, and no doubt return to.”
  BOOK REVIEWS · 08/07/2017
  And Then by Donald Breckenridge
  Reviewed by Michael Browne

  Black Sparrow, 2017
  And Then is the latest novella from Brooklyn-based writer and fiction editor of the Brooklyn Rail, Donald Breckenridge. The book presents itself as a collage of interwoven stories concerned with how our lives intersect in strange and sometimes esoteric ways, and how the past is never that far behind. And Then is a taut meditation on the living and the dead, and the hold they have on our present lives.

  The fractured narrative style of the book begins with an uncharacteristically linear and straightforward beat-by-beat narration of the Jean Rouch film Gare du Nord. This opening passage is an extremely tight and minimal piece of prose that helps prepare us tonally and stylistically for what is to come. Breckenridge’s narrative treatment of the film is such that it works incredibly well as its own piece of short fiction, which is remarkable. Breckenridge’s apt transcription of on-screen marital strain and one wife’s desire for another life is beautifully rendered:

  She wants to know why he thinks her desire to travel is so ridiculous. She wants to know why he thinks her fantasies about escaping their everyday existence are so unrealistic.

  Here, Breckenridge has brilliantly reproduced a feeling from the screen, to the page, in an effort to bring us closer to the type of quiet longing that stalks the characters within And Then. Not only does Breckenridge’s narration of Gare Du Nord represent a kind of postmodern playfulness/meta-exercise, but it also works as a great emotional backdrop for the novella that follows in earnest.

  Structurally, the book alternates between a few different storylines and shifts skillfully between them paragraph by paragraph. Breckenridge possesses a deft narrative hand, and the paragraph by paragraph style works well juxtaposed with the book’s brevity, giving us momentary vignette-style glimpses into each fractured storyline. One such story follows a twenty-one-year-old cashier named Suzanne, who, like the wife in Gare du Nord, has a nagging wanderlust and desire to leave her current life behind. To achieve this, she ends up robbing the convenience store she works at with her equally despairing boss John, a drifter running from his failed marriage. Eventually the narrative catches up with Suzanne in New York during the 70s where she lives out a bohemian lifestyle and falls victim to heroin. And Then paints a nuanced picture of sorrow and malaise as feelings that are ultimately inescapably tied to the present and the past, and there is no consolation for the downcast and troubled.

  Another narrative within the novella follows a student who is looking after his professor’s apartment over the summer. Breckenridge cleverly and subtly manages to weave the story of the student and that of Suzanne’s stay in NYC together, albeit ten years apart. As the layers are pulled back on the student’s voyeuristic stay, he discovers that Suzanne is the woman in the photographs in some boxes that his professor wanted him to throw away. We indirectly get a glimpse of a past that not only lingers in the apartment of his professor, but also makes itself apparent later on via a strange paranormal encounter.

  Stylistically, And Then is an exciting and wholly inventive read. Breckenridge’s prose style can at first seem disorienting, but his ability to carefully insert dialogue in the middle of a string of narration works to create a vivid and almost cinematic reading. The capacity of Breckenridge to juxtapose narrative action and dialogue side by side creates a richly impressionistic experience that works:

  When John looked back the 7/11 was framed in the rearview mirror, “Would you mind,“ he reached over, ”doing the honors,“ opened the glove compartment, ”should be some papers in here as well,“ handed her the bag then shifted into third…

  The language throughout And Then sees Breckenridge take a cue from the minimalists, employing plainspoken and direct language that acts as the perfect tool to describe some of the more banal passages of the book:

  I asked the waitress for a chocolate donut and told her I didn’t need a bag. She handed me the donut with a serrated sheet of wax paper folded over it, “that will be ninety cents,” and two napkins. I removed a dollar from my wallet and gave it to her…

  Through the banal, Breckenridge asks us to dig into the subtext of the narrative. We find a rather bleak and depressive world of Carver-esque characters who are looking for a way out and looking to come to terms with a past that is shrouded and hard to access emotionally and intellectually. The world of And Then is a place where the despairing continue to despair without much relief, and in the case of the nonfiction passages about Breckenridge’s father, characters despair stubbornly without want of relief. The epigraph of the book, from Eugene Ionesco’s Present Past Past Present perfectly foreshadows the silent longing that defines the characters:

  I have the key to happiness: remember, be profoundly, profoundly, totally conscious that you are. I myself, sorry to say, hardly ever use this key. I keep losing it.

  The heartbreakingly fractured memoir of the author’s deceased father charts a period of several years when he purposefully declined in health. In the same direct, matter-of-fact quality that is Breckenridge’s tonal choice throughout, he details his father’s slow and calculated death. These passages are the most tactile and brutally painful of the entire book. Written in the unsentimental tone that marks the book from beginning to end, Breckenridge talks about the last time he saw his father:

  He was able to feed himself again, with supervision, but his teeth hadn’t been brushed in weeks…I told him I knew he wanted to die at home and I respected his choice but we were not yet ready to say goodbye…he looked up and thanked me.

  With And Then, Breckenridge has created a haunting collage that is both melancholy and without solace. The yearning characters are seemingly at odds with life from the start, and there is no redemptive power to be found within these pages. Breckenridge has also announced himself as a truly original stylist, and his new novella should be featured on some “best of” lists by year’s end.

  +++

  Donald Breckenridge lives in Brooklyn with his spouse, Johannah Rodgers. He is the Fiction Editor of the Brooklyn Rail, Co-Founder and Co-Editor of InTranslation, and the Managing Editor of Red Dust Books. He has written four novels, edited two fiction anthologies, and introduced the NYRB Classics edition of Henri Duchemin and His Shadows by Emmanuel Bove.

• Hyperallergic
  https://hyperallergic.com/380012/donald-breckenridge-and-then-2017/
  Word count: 829

  Quoted in Sidelights: “is interested in the ways different lives intersect with one another and briefly throw off sparks before moving on.”
  “could frustrate readers” i
  “Short enough to be read in a single sitting, And Then couples the tautness and control of a short story with the philosophical expansiveness of a novel. The resonances remain fresh and clear, the connections subtle but not so oblique as to be enigmatic.”
  Crosscutting Tales: Donald Breckenridge’s Novel And Then
  Satisfying both on the level of story and style, And Then is a thoughtful meditation on the residue that remains: the ghosts that people our lives, the dead we cannot forget.

  Brian EvensonMay 21, 2017
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  Donald Breckenridge’s latest novella, And Then, begins with a brief section that describes, in detail, the plot of Jean Rouch’s film Gare du Nord. It’s a gesture that sets the mood and the tone of the book, but it does more than that. Rouch’s short film splits into two parts: the first is about a domestic struggle between a fairly ordinary couple; the second about an extraordinary interaction between the wife and a man who commits suicide after she declines to run away with him. Breckenridge too has an interest in crosscutting between banal and extraordinary situations. He is interested in the ways different lives intersect with one another and briefly throw off sparks before moving on.

  But there are profound differences as well. Where Rouch’s film remains tightly focused on three characters, Breckenridge offers a collage of several stories that extends beyond its three main characters. There’s Suzanne, who, with her boss, robs the store she works at, then leaves with half the money for New York, has a love affair with a photographer, gets involved with drugs, and eventually disappears. There’s Tom, a student who is apartment-sitting for a female professor he has a crush on. There’s also a first-person narrator — Breckenridge himself, according to Douglas Glover’s introduction — who painfully recounts the story of his father’s long decline into humiliation and death.

  These fragmentary narratives interweave with one another irregularly, competing for prominence. Though Breckenridge never insists on it, we increasingly get the feeling that the narratives may overlap and connect across time and in a way the characters themselves — with the possible exception of the first-person narrator — can’t see: Tom discovers, among the professor’s belongings, information that makes his crush seem hopeless and photographs of a woman who might well be Suzanne; Suzanne, or someone very much like her, reappears as a ghost in one of the other two stories.

  Breckenridge is carefully balanced throughout. A minimalist, he never reveals too much, and makes us work to connect what he does give us. We see snatches of other narratives in addition to those described above: a soldier who dies in Vietnam; brief glimpses of people on the street, seen perhaps through a window. The mood can shift from section to section, though there is a sense of longing that permeates the book as a whole. The memoir of the father is brutally honest and painful in a way that those who have lost a close relative to protracted mortality can understand.

  The overall effect of the interwoven and crosscut narratives is disorienting — more of something half-glimpsed than fully seen. This is augmented by Breckenridge’s unusual and abrupt shifting between description and dialogue:

  She removed a bible tract from her purse, “Really fucking weird,” presented it to him, “someone gave me this,” then recalled the middle-aged preacher with the greasy comb-over sweating profusely in a purple polyester suit, “and the train took forever,” who demanded Suzanne accept God’s salvation…

  Descriptions are interrupted and then, when continued, often interrupt the dialogue that interrupted them in the first place. You find yourself not moving forward but doubling back, reevaluating what you thought you knew. This is also true of the book as a whole, with each story circling back before another interrupts it, recalling earlier events moments later.

  It’s the kind of strategy that could increasingly frustrate readers the longer a book goes, but Breckenridge takes advantage of the strengths of the novella: short enough to be read in a single sitting, And Then couples the tautness and control of a short story with the philosophical expansiveness of a novel. The resonances remain fresh and clear, the connections subtle but not so oblique as to be enigmatic. Satisfying both on the level of story (or, rather stories) and style, And Then is a thoughtful meditation on the residue that remains: the ghosts that people our lives, the dead we cannot forget.

  And Then (2017) is published by David R. Godine/ Black Sparrow Books and is available from Amazon and other online booksellers.

• Fjords
  http://www.fjordsreview.com/reviews/and-then-book.html
  Word count: 784

  Quoted in Sidelights: “are elegantly interwoven,”
  “mothing is fully explained at once, each piece of the puzzle is revealed and gradually the details of the big picture come into view.”
  “So much is hidden in the smallest detail, that And Then presents a layered experience for readers—one they will linger on, and no doubt return to.”
  AND THEN BY DONALD BRECKENRIDGE

  Fjords Review, And Then by Donald Breckenridge
  April 27, 2017

  NOVEL
  AND THEN
  BY DONALD BRECKENRIDGE
  ISBN-13: 978-1574232295

  Reviewed by Neil Tesh

  ‘She wants to know why he thinks her desire to travel is so ridiculous. He says that it isn’t ridiculous. She wants to know why he thinks her fantasies about escaping their everyday life are so unrealistic.’

  Breckenridge’s ethereal language describing Jean Rouch’s short “Le Gare Du Nord” echoes the film itself, and sets us up for the detailed, tense relationship between place and detail throughout And Then. The novel holds our attention with a subtle rise and fall between tragedy and a yearning for adventure free of constraint. The story meditates on the mundane aspects of life, often highlighting the hidden beauty within those moments that we either miss, or in other cases invent to create meaning. Breckenridge’s revolving cast of disparate, though recognizable characters digs deep into the journey of life, finding revelations at every crossroad. Like an urban maze, narratives are elegantly interwoven, circling around the lives of people and their seemingly pedestrian lives.

  Suzanne, almost imperceptibly, blossoms as she follows her dreams of freedom and authenticity. Instead of giving into the inertia of her dead-end job, she takes the leap and travels to New York on a whim at the suggestion of her manager. During conversation in a telephone booth outside her motel, information of mistakes in her past threatens her livelihood. After a relationship with a photographer is ripped apart by selfish intentions, she gradually loses herself to the temptations of life and disappears from the lives of those who care about her.

  Tom, a grad student struggling to write a thesis worthy of impressing his peers, searches for something worth holding on to in life as he spends the summer cat sitting for his professor, with whom he has an unrequited romance. Shuffling through a box destined for the dumpster, he stumbles upon a series of pictures of a beautiful blonde woman. A one night stand becomes the first step in discovering the origins of the mysterious woman and her photographer.

  Even seemingly insignificant people prove to be the guiding forces needed for metamorphosis, the angels perched on their shoulders, with a myriad of faces. The pages of And Then demand to be turned, continually blurring the lines between dream and reality.

  ‘ “Is it your heart,” Suzanne crossed her right leg over her left knee, “or your phone that’s broken?” ‘

  Highlighting the struggles of intimacy in a world filled with distractions, both in personal life and in social settings, And Then beautifully portrays what it feels like to be on both sides of the coin. Nothing is fully explained at once, each piece of the puzzle is revealed and gradually the details of the big picture come into view.

  Leaning on flashback, Breckenridge unfolds each scene with the precision of a tightly woven spring slowly loosening, enveloping the reader with a sense of familiarity. As relationships unravel, the sting of abandonment can be felt in the darkest moments, while new light is shed on the meaning of what it means to love. And Then revels in a sensation of jumping back to another time to contextualize details of the present moment.

  A young woman struggles to find herself in an unfeeling world, while her past chases her across the country. A boy lusts after a life which is not his own, searches for answers in the fleeting exchanges of passersby. Children watch their father’s agonizing decay, struggles to find a way of preventing the inevitable. Heat burns the skin of a soldier searching for safety amid raging war. Each page is a testament to the idea that every person walking the street has a story that is continually unfolding, though rarely told.

  Even with an engaging, often frenetic style of dialog, Breckenridge thrives on subtext, allowing the reader to build a unique and personal bond with every character. So much is hidden in the smallest detail, that And Then presents a layered experience for readers—one they will linger on, and no doubt return to.

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