James Chapman (author)

James Chapman (born 1955) is an American novelist and publisher. He was raised in Bakersfield, California, has lived in New York City since 1978, and is the author of ten novels to date.

His work combines experimental technique with a direct emotionality, often dealing with the anguish inherent in human communication.

Excerpted in many print and online magazines, his work has won a Notable Stories in StorySouth's Million Writers Award, and been nominated four times for the Pushcart Prize.

In his first novel, Our Plague (A Film from New York) (1993), the protagonist is an underground filmmaker alienated from his own body, disgusted by his own careerism, and awash in apocalyptic visions. Not a lucid book, rather a difficult one, though energetic and full of unexpected choices.

The story in the brief The Walls Collide as You Expand, Dwarf Maple (1993) seems almost desiccated: a young woman grows up, meets a man on a train, and lives with him in a city. The writing, as such, is simple and spare, unlike that of his other books.

Glass (Pray the Electrons Back to Sand) (1994), a "Television-War Novel" about the first Gulf War, blurs reality into its electronic media equivalent, to suggest a new, amoral, surrealistically detached technological level to the old horrors of war. The nearest to a conventional novel by this author.

In Candyland It's Cool to Feed on Your Friends (1998), a strangely knotted and personal work, deals with an indigent photographer who loses his closest friends for the crime of having exploited them for his artwork. The frame provided for the narrative strongly implies that something like this took place in the author's own life.

The visionary, messianic heroine of Daughter! I Forbid Your Recurring Dream! (2000) flings herself into all manner of self-expression, but willfully loses faith in each attempt at meaning, and each time ends up more broken, more solitary.

Stet (2006), Chapman's most ambitious book to date, takes the form of a bitter "Russian novel" about an ecstatic and weirdly oblivious Soviet filmmaker and painter, who ends up in prison camp as punishment for his private and antisocial tendencies.

How is This Going to Continue? (2007), a shorter work in the form of an oratorio libretto, seems to carry the artist-figure, a composer this time, further into private grief and alienation. The subject of this "libretto" is the death of the composer's wife, followed by the composer's own death. The novel, if such it is, consists entirely of quotations from other sources (many of which are, however, invented).

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