Colby Smith’s unusual, diverse and experimental collection The Universe as Performance Art is the latest release from Eibonvale Press, available now in hardcover and paperback. Here is the text from the book cover:
The Universe as Performance Art, Colby Smith’s first short fiction collection, is a disquieting, panoramic gallery exhibition obsessed with art’s arranged marriage with Nature and the consequences of art itself. Here are stories of an epidemic of fossils repurposed as psychotropic drugs, the Marquis de Sade’s first orgasm, queer love nourished—and destroyed—through making and documenting graffiti, and others. The title story is at once a staged, Fluxus-esque creation myth and a structurally daring prose poem. The Universe as Performance Art is an indispensable contribution to the Neo-Decadent international art movement canon and a formidable short fiction debut by any standard.
“Colby Smith’s extreme and poetic vision—immense, psychedelic flowers!—is a cosmos driven by the lithified dead, the cannibalistic heavens, the revelry after the destruction of creation. These stories read like nerve ganglia lit by Ursa Minor, writ by hands tending to abnormal forms in a fatal garden.”
—Paul Cunningham, author of Fall Garment and The House of the Tree of Sores
Seeing existence itself as a kind of performance art – whether in an absolute sense or on a human level, with no division between basic existence and creative processes – is a clue to the range of processes going on in this book. Ranging from neo-decadent and experimental literature, to slipstream and hints of genre, to science and palaeontology and beyond, it’s an exceptionally diverse recipe of stories and an excitingly original literary voice.
In terms of designing the cover, this very directly followed the scrappy collage style that I keep coming back to. To generalise, there have been several different styles that keep reappearing in Eibonvale covers. There was the early days when I was trying to use Photoshop to create semi-realistic but surreal dioramas, then came the “Museum Showcase” style where everything is framed up for display, and then there’s the “Scrappy City Wall Covered in Stickers and Posters” style. I think it was Rosanne Rabinowitz’s Resonance and Revolt where that first started emerging – the eruditely revolutionary style of her writing suggesting urban anger very easily. But the nice thing about these sticker walls is that I can maintain full control over just who lives in this city. And if that urban angst includes old Iranian art, outdated dinosaur reconstructions and drawings of microsnails from my own childhood, then so be it. Such a city may exist. And in the case of Colby Smith, such a city HAS to exist.
Grab a copy of the book here: http://www.eibonvalepress.co.uk/books/books_PerformanceArt.htm and as always, postage is free on orders over £20, which includes the hardcover version. Also, we are always looking for more reviewers, so if you have a blog or a place to share, please do reach out for a review copy.
The Eibonvale Press Blog 