John Riddell

In Writing Surfaces, derek beaulieu and Lori Emerson present a collection of John Riddell's work. Riddell's poems and short stories are a remarkable mix of largely typewriter-based concrete poetry mixed with fiction and drawings. Riddell's oeuvre fell out of popular attention, but it has recently garnered interest among poets and critics engaged with media studies (especially studies of the typewriter) and experimental writing. Riddell is best known for his short fiction pieces ""H"" and ""Pope Leo: El Elope,"" a pair of graphic fictions written in collaboration with, or dedicated to, bpNichol. However, his work moves well beyond comic strips into a series of radical fictions. Riddell's work embraces game play, unreadability and illegibility, procedural work, non-representational narrative, photocopy degeneration, collage, handwritten texts, and gestural work. His self-aware and meta-textual short fiction challenges the limits of machine-based composition and his reception as a media-based poet. With media studies increasingly turning to ""media archaeology"" and the reading and study of antiquated, analogue-based modes of composition (as typified by the photocopier and the fax machine as well as the typewriter), Riddell is a perfect candidate for further appreciation and study by new generations of readers, authors, and scholars.

Toward the United Front is a record of the proceedings of the last congress of the Communist International in which Lenin participated, now at last available in English. Newly translated and richly annotated, it discloses a rich spectrum of viewpoints. It features indispensable source material on early Communism with an introduction, detailed footnotes, 500+ short biographies, glossary, chronology and index, making it one of the most comprehensive accounts of early Communism.

A/Z Does It is a collection of conceptual wordplays and concrete puns, by an innovative writer who literally draws the line between impractical fictions and improbable art.