Curtis White

"A contemporary version of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, Curtis White's novel begins with Mann's "unassuming young man," Hans Castorp, visiting his cousin at a health retreat. In this version though, the retreat is a spa for recovering alcoholics, unlike all other rehab centers. Rather than encouraging their patients to free themselves of their addiction, the directors of The Elixir believe that sobriety isn't for everyone, that you must let alcohol work its way on you. Filled with many compelling and comic voices, White's novel is a strange and unlikely world that, nevertheless, is quite recognizable as our own."--Jacket.

Social critic Curtis White describes a little-noticed force taking over our culture and our lives that he calls the Middle Mind: the current failure of the American imagination in the media, politics, education, art, technology, and religion. Irreverent, provocative, and far-reaching, contemptuous of the Right's narrowness and incredulous before the Left's convolutions, White presents a clear vision of this dangerous mindset that threatens America's intellectual and cultural freedoms, concluding with an imperative to reawaken and unleash the once powerful American imagination.--From publisher description.

Memories of My Father Watching TV has as its protagonists television shows, around which the personalities of family members are shaped. The shows have a life of their own and become the arena of shared experience. And in Curtis White's hands, they become a son's projections of what he wants for himself and his father through characters in "Combat," "Highway Patrol," "Bonanza," and other television shows (and one movie) from the 1950s and '60s. Comic in many ways, Memories is finally a sad lament of a father-son relationship that is painful and tortured, displayed against a background of what they most shared, the watching of television, the universal American experience.

In Monstrous Possibility Curtis White creates a lucid perspective on what it means to be a writer and a human being in the so-called post-modern moment.

This delightfully eccentric novel orbits about the character of one “Siva,” a woman who is perhaps a Hindi divinity, probably merely a Midwestern housewife, but also very possibly a porn-queen What if Western revolution and Eastern reincarnation were discovered to be the same thing? What if the Hindu classic The Mahabharata and Hugo's Les Miserables were in fact the same book? And what would it feel like if one person were able to experience this epic east/west continuance in one life? This delightfully eccentric novel orbits about the character of one “Siva,” a woman who is perhaps a Hindi divinity, probably merely a Midwestern housewife, but also very possibly a porn-queen. Her web of tales takes her bewildered husband and the reader on a mythic and philosophic storytelling trek from ancient India, to the Paris Commune, to the St. Louis Hegelians, and finally to a neighborhood very like yours. Curtis White's Anarcho-Hindu is an unabashedly learned investigation of these recondite matters. Like The Bhagavad-Gita, the epic tale of cousin aligned against cousin in monstrous self-destruction, Anarcho-Hindu is a book about people willingly conspiring in their own defeat. Against this self-inflicted human suffering, this novel proposes the gestures of self-understanding and play that can liberate us both politically and personally. The heroes of the book are the ghostly spirits of Marx and Krishna, together for the first time, engaged in the inspired play called Refusal. (Source: [University of British Columbia Press](

x, 326 p. : 21 cm

"In the last quarter century, the marketplace for serious fiction has been steadily co-opted by corporations, multinationals, and now publishing megaconglomerates that know no national boundaries. In this abyss, FC2 - one of the most unlikely projects in the history of American publishing, run by writers for writers - has created an enduring place for the pure devilish fun of play and change. Along the way, FC2 has introduced readers to the works of Mark Layner, Russell Banks, Raymond Federman, Ronald Sukenick, Eurudice, Gerald Vizenor and many more."--BOOK JACKET.