Mark Axelrod
Mark Axelrod is a Full Professor of English & Comparative Literature at Chapman University, and the Director of the John Fowles Center for Creative Writing. He is a two-time recipient of a United Kingdom Leverhulme Fellowship for Creative Writing, and a three-time recipient of the Alliance Française National Writing Award. He has published four novels, a short story collection, and three books of criticism. He is also a practicing screenwriter who has written two film books and over twenty screenplays and teleplays. He has been awarded for his work by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; the Writers Guild of America, East; the Screenwriters Forum (University of Wisconsin); and the Sundance Institute.
Borges’ Travel, Hemingway’s Garage: Secret Histories
An innovative writer, with a postmodern inclination for exotic linguistic labyrinths of the mind into which he loves to encapsulate his own tormented fantasies.
Borges’ Travel, Hemingway’s Garage: Secret Histories
Mark Axelrod
2004
Quality Paper
ISBN 978-1-57366-114-0
If art imitated capitalism, it would look like Borges’ Travel, Hemingway’s Garage. In this secret guide to culture, Mark Axelrod has scoured Europe and the Americas, photographing products and businesses that bear the great names of Western civilization, and then has recounted the little-known turns of fate by which our immortals ended in these mundane straits.
Learn the untold history of Rembrandt’s Toothpaste, Van Gogh’s Potatoes, Lautrec Handbags, and Kipling’s Rucksacks. Dine on Fellini’s Pollo La Strada in Brussels. Hear the great Czech fabulist kibitzing with his cooks at Kafka’s Cafe, and find out about Christ’s “hidden years” at the Taverne Chez Jesus.
Axelrod’s guide reconnects contemporary reality with a heritage it has rendered dreamlike, making tangible the hallucinatory grandeur still projected from our past. For those who lament our culture’s prostitution to capital, Borges’ Travel, Hemingway’s Garage offers definitive proof that art lives on.
A different voice in North American Writing … a very special, poignant sense of humor.
This novel is an experiment with style and a comment on the social fabric of the United States. Replete with experiment, it contains advertising blurbs, movie blurbs, and typographic dalliances. It is also a satire on Hollywood film; American television, folklore, advertising, and education; the U.S. presidency; Ronald Reagan; and publishing prejudices and “literary” agent incompetence. Moreover, it contains a panoply of gibes, jabs, and gestures at American culture in general. The author is attempting to prove that the novel is not dead, only that those people who want to write novels in the style of Balzac are dead.