:: STEPHEN-PAUL MARTIN ::


160 pages
$16.95 (paper)
ISBN 978-1-57366-134-8

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The Possibility of Music - Reviews

""Language, of course, was the only way I could tell myself what I knew. Yet once I told myself what I knew, I was trapped in a verbal reduction, a grammatical picture of something that was not the thing itself, something like the difference between a fishbowl and the sea."


These words, from a brilliant story called "A New Kind of Happiness," pinpoint the very special quality of Stephen-Paul Martin's fiction. On the one hand, there is, as Wittgenstein put it, nothing outside of language; on the other, even language, this author knows, is never enough. So,"between a fishbowl and the sea," Martin spins his arresting tales, tales full of surprises and yet reassuringly "normal." The Possibility of Music is a joy to read. "

-Marjorie Perloff

"Stephen-Paul Martin has, for many years, brilliantly wrestled with the problems posed by his own chosen material/experience. Entering his witty contemporary monologues, the reader unravels the great questions: does a person anticipate his or her own actions, as one word in a sentence anticipates the next? Or is an event an explosion of contingencies that arrive fully integrated? "I didn't expect to become a composer," he begins one story and this one statement articulates the magnificent and entertaining wrestling match he performs with time and act in each of his beautifully crafted stories."

-Fanny Howe