ABECEDARIUM by Davis Schneiderman and Carlos Hernandez

Sleek like a culture-jamming missile, satisfying like a cheap bottle of wine, ferocious like a genetically modified Carnival Dragon, Abecedarium rolls all three into one mother of a tale.
 
--Raymond Federman

Cover of Abecedarium

NOW AVAILABLE! from Chiasmus Press

With only a few set rules to bind the ten chapters together (each vignette includes a Chinese Dragon, a mention of Carnival, etc.), ABECEDARIUM follows the protagonist Fex-a post-industrial, pre-apocalyptic Everyman-through the absurdities of a world that forces him to act always in his own self interest. Fex's anachronistic tour of history leads him to France during the Nazi occupation, a steak-eating contest in the bowels of Arkansas, a Sotheby's auction of his much-coveted DNA, and a nightmarish reality-TV show that delights in his contractual obligation to simultaneously observe and participate. Nauseating calla lilies, the human genome, and a talking dog possessed by the devil all play integral roles in the aggregate of meaninglessness Fex boldly confronts, disassembles, and reshapes into the genetic code of the entire explosive novel.


A Note on Method:

The ten chapters of this "sudden" novel were composed collaboratively at separate computers located in the same small bedroom in Ithaca, NY. After a period of simultaneous composition, we would switch seats to edit/overwrite the other author's work, changing, altering, and adding whatever we chose. Then, we would switch seats again and work similarly on our "original" compositions, repeating this process beyond these three iterations during a brief editing period (that occurred after all ten chapters had been produced as described). In this way, we were thus encouraged to lose ourselves in the work so that a third mind that moves between us could develop.

Selected web excerpts:

Fex Falls
Fex's Contractual Obligations and Fearful Symmetry