Hoptime

Fiction. Edited by Walter Smart. Plotless, absurd, nonsensical, arbitrary, silly, mad, ribald, noisy, violent, despairing, obscene, drug-addled, revolting, and hilarious, J. F. Mamjjasond and Fafnir Finkelmeyer’s HOPTIME is both an insult to the very idea of a novel and an uncanny magnification of it. In the words of Finkelmeyer, it was for its authors a kind of scripture and something fateful and necessary; it was a way, he writes in the Foreword to this edition, for the two of us to love each other in the only way we could, willingly and totally entwined in each other’s foolish, ugly, wise and beautiful fantasies, which we heard, supported and forgave. In the end, this colorful romp of two outrageous souls lost together in a sort of infinite poetic and imaginative wilderness is not only explosively funny, but moving; the reader, too, is freed into the intimacy and deep silence of a vast inner space, and finds in that solitude one is not alone.