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Lost Between the Edges. 2007.

Published By Semiotext(e)

"I understand that you regard the film Schindler's List as a total lie, as Zionist propaganda." Zundel clears his throat, preparing the posture of his body to pontificate, to deliver a speech he has obviously memorized for use at a hate rally: "Spielberg's movie is a perfect example of Hollywood hate propaganda ..."
~ from Lost Between the Edges. Eldon Garnet

In Eldon Garnet's Lost Between the Edges, a feverish intellectual, frustrated by the failures of government, acts alone to eliminate an infamous Holocaust denier. The protagonist, a renegade academic and punk intellectual known only as X, puts his radical ideas into action by firebombing the headquarters of Ernst Zundel, publisher of Did Six Million Really Die?

With its incisive critique and its use of real documentation, Lost Between the Edges blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction. Garnet, like W. G. Sebald before him, uses factual documentation of dubious authenticity to construct his narrative. But as the novel progresses, its story becomes so powerful that we find its truth lies not in its factual trappings but in the emotional and intellectual reality of its expression. Garnet reveals the illusory nature of facts, showing not only how they dazzle but also how they destroy.

Lost Between the Edges captures the energy and verve of youth in revolt, fired by rage and ideas. Garnet's book will be hailed as a new classic of symbolic warfare waged in the street and the mind.

Click here to purchase Lost Between The Edges @ MIT Press

Reading Brooke Shields, the garden of failure. 1995.

Published By Semiotext(e)

This dialogue about depression and culture constitutes Canadian author Eldon Garnet's "confessions" as a failed cultural critic who, after writing all his life, is faced once again with the desire.

Awakened from semiretirement by a magazine commission on Brooke Shields, an icon of virginal perfection, Garnet has his narrator weave a dark tale of professionalism, the abyss of failure that remains when the fifteen minutes of fame have long since dried up.

The "subject" of the narrative, Brooke Shields, becomes an untouchable, idealized figure in a world of personalities and faces.

It is through the very absence and untouchability of this fetishized celebrity icon that Garnet describes the vicissitudes of his narrator's decline. Sinister, comical, and profound, Garnet's novel is a work of cultural politics and radical honesty.

Click here to purchase Reading Brooke Shields, the garden of failure @ MIT Press