The Short of it All

"A beautiful and humorous fresco of a life converted into a literary project through memories and dreams made into fiction by the ... transformative act of writing." Luis Alejandro Ordóñez, author of El último New York Times. "We're all imperfect and vulnerable.... Assuming our limitations ... with humor is ... an indisputable merit of [this] book." Ángel Quintero Rivera, Professor, Universidad de Puerto Rico y author of Salsa, Sabor y Control. With a tip of his hat to Kafka, M, the professor/author protagonist of Marc Zimmerman's new book, lives his life haunted by problems with his weight and wives, his writing, teaching and ethnicity. Where does all this lead? What can one make of these dreams and scenes of memory fiction? This small book is one of dreams and scenes that have emerged in Zimmerman's pursuit of memoir fiction over the last several years. Some of the stories perhaps seem to be trivial, others are clearly more; but all of them, taken together, achieve some kind of ultimate depth. The stories stem from his boyhood memories and projections; from his anxieties throughout his career and his life as Jewish American and human being. Several stem from his years after retirement, when he faces the dread of being diminished, mocked or forgotten as he rushes toward the dark. ... These stories are really "the short" of what Zimmerman has written-the shortest of his all. "If memories are ultimately fiction, no matter how based on our experiences, then, memoirs are inevitably fictional representations of memory; and memoir fictions are the overt reworking of memory into aesthetically refracted narratives. Logically, then, memoir dream fictions are somehow the narrations of dreams and dreamlike scenes which throughout or in one moment or another, lead to the intervention of ... a... fictional trope which what we can remember of our dreams the substance and form required to somehow achieve status as 'literature.'" Marc Zimmerman, from The Short of it All. Author and editor of some forty-plus books, Marc Zimmerman is U. of Illinois at Chicago and U. of Houston Emeritus Professor. He has recently published several topic-driven books for the first cycle of his ongoing "memoir fiction" or autofiction Illusions of Memory series, including Martin and Marvin, Lines on the Border The Italian Daze, and other tomes.