Synopsis "Multifesto: A Henri D'Mescan Reader (in English)"
with Remixes by James Tadd Adcox, Matt Bell, Molly Gaudry, Roxane Gay, Lily Hoang, Matt Kirkpatrick, Alissa Nutting, Kathleen Rooney, Ben Tanzer; Introductions by Craig Saper; & an afterword by William Walsh First released by Spuyten Duyvil in 2006 as a limited fine-arts edition, Multifesto is a provocative novel that traces the life of the fabricated Henri d’Mescan, a fictional cultural theorist, philosopher, and writer. The character’s public image is manipulated by the political and aesthetic agendas of his two editors: Davis Schneiderman and Phoenelia Yeer. The novel is constructed from pastiches of footnotes, abstracts, propaganda, marginalia, and movie scripts to subvert the form of the introductory college “Reader.” Using falsified historical documentation and fabricated scholarship to function as both fiction and history, Multifesto broadens the novel form, building upon the experimental tradition of writers and incorporating fragments from authors as diverse as William S. Burroughs, Sun Ra, and Jean Genet. The various contributors to the “Remix” edition, each taking their own spin on their assignment, provide provocative, hilarious, and disastrously original remixes to Schneiderman’s original text. The remixes offer Madlibs, metafiction, and word searches, all remaining as sinuous and unpredictable as the elusive Henri d’Mescan. "Open Multifesto anywhere, careful reader, and your feet will come unmoored from the ground, your liver will be eaten by hungry jackals, substituting for an eagle, and your eyes, feeding your brain phrases such as I AM READING A BOOK, will grow thick with beautiful cataracts. The text spins like a square planet into untold dimensions of heat and light—where heat, no longer warm, and light, no longer bright, are free to assume new costumes in a Mardi Gras drag show." Raymond Federman, author of Return to Manure (FC2), and twenty other books of fiction, poetry, and criticism "Very seldom does a book come along that’s as difficult to characterize as Davis Schneiderman’s Multifesto: A Henri d’Mescan Reader, a baroque architecture of writing, a wedding-cake of literary history, criticism, politics, and art. It’s as though Duchamp, Deleuze and Guattari, and Burroughs have collaborated to create a work that is part artist book, part biography, part album, all send-up—a work that is determined to throw the definition of literature into flux once again." Steve Tomasula, author of The Book of Portraiture (FC2), VAS: An Opera in Flatland (Chicago), and In & Oz (Ministry of Whimsy) "This is a stunningly original work deserving of careful, and multiple, readings by anybody interested in where American literature is headed…Multifesto soars with electrifying lyricism, the improbable poetry of ideas that cut with diamantine precision while also managing to lay bare what it means to be human even in the most in- or post-human of landscapes." Leora Lev, American Book Review
