"Card Tricks" (Electric Literature's Recommended Reading Book 101)

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"I’ll confess that when my friend James Hannaham first mentioned that he was writing fiction in the form of art gallery plaques, my reaction was selfish: I wished I’d thought of it," writes Jennifer Egan, Pulitzer Prize winning author of "A Visit from the Goon Squad," in her introduction to this issue of Recommended Reading. "The idea is so clearly excellent, involving the use of a non-literary genre that is textual, but also rich with its own conventions and dramatic possibilities. What more could a fiction writer possibly want?
"But a manifestly great idea can be dangerous—as likely to smother as to sustain the fiction we beckon into its midst. In the end, the narrative must be absorbing enough to make us forget about the concept. Hannaham’s 'Card Tricks' brilliantly achieves this. Presented first in a gallery space on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, Hannaham’s work probes the genre of art gallery plaques from many angles, fabricating them from metal as well as paper, varying their sizes in significant ways, placing a plaque outdoors as well as on gallery walls, and—most powerfully—implicating the viewer directly and playfully. Anyone familiar with Hannaham’s fiction knows already the potent blend of flexibility, humor and gravitas that is his trademark. It is exhilarating to see the same qualities at play in three dimensions."

About the Author:
James Hannaham, author of the novel God Says No , has published stories in One Story, Fence, Open City, The Literary Review, Story Quarterly, and BOMB. For a long time he has contributed to the Village Voice and other publications. He was a co-founder of the performance group Elevator Repair Service and worked with them from 1992–2002. More recently he has exhibited text-based visual art at Samsøn Projects, Rosalux Gallery, The Center for Emerging Visual Artists, and 490 Atlantic. His second novel, Delicious Foods, will appear from Little, Brown in 2015. He teaches creative writing at The Pratt Institute and Columbia University.

About the Guest Editor:
Jennifer Egan was born in Chicago and raised in San Francisco. She is the author of The Invisible Circus, a novel which became a feature film starring Cameron Diaz in 2001, Look at Me, a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction in 2001, Emerald City and Other Stories and the bestselling The Keep. Her most recent novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad, won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, and the LA Times Book Prize. Her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harpers, Granta, McSweeney’s and other magazines. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, and a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library. Her non-fiction articles appear frequently in the New York Times Magazine. Her 2002 cover story on homeless children received the Carroll Kowal Journalism Award, and “The Bipolar Kid” received a 2009 NAMI Outstanding Media Award for Science and Health Reporting from the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

About the Publisher:
Electric Literature is an independent publisher amplifying the power of storytelling through digital innovation. Electric Literature’s weekly fiction magazine, Recommended Reading, publishes one story a week for free. In addition to publishing original fiction, Recommended Reading invites established authors, indie presses, and literary magazines to personally recommended the fiction that has inspired them. Please visit recommended reading.tumblr.com to browse the archives and stay in touch via email, Facebook, and Twitter.