ccp 003
Denny Smith (stories)
by Robert Glück
240 pp.
isbn: 0-9723234-4-9
$12.95






The stories in Denny Smith use events in the life of Robert Glück as a ground for the expansion of empathy and intellect. These events include burglary, sex, conversation, reading, humiliation, child raising, and porn. A teenage girl runs away from home and takes up with a pair of Bible-reading boys named after the Beatles; the theft of a shovel from a postal truck brings our narrator to an epiphany about his relationship with his father; the pleasures and sorrows of intimacy and betrayal are analyzed, obscured, abstracted, and reveled in. Self-absorbed, the stories are nevertheless profoundly communal. As William Burroughs said of Glück's earlier novel, Jack the Modernist, "in this book self-exploration is so precise it becomes impersonal."

"He is not sentimental, not cloying, never simplifying. His faintly naive tone is never glib nor false. His voice is a tool of alien design for teasing interest from the world...He's too truthful for sleight-of-hand. This isn't his method; it's his subject. Truthfulness."
— David McConnell, Lambda Book Report


Robert Glück is the author of the novels Margery Kempe (Serpent's Tail Publishing, 1994), Jack the Modernist (Serpent's Tail Pub lishing, 1995), and three collections of prose and poetry: Reader (Lapis Press, 1989), Elements of a Coffee Service (Four Seasons Foundation, 1983), and Denny Smith (Clear Cut Press, 2004). He lives in San Francisco and teaches at San Francisco State University, where he is an editor of the online journal Narrativity. Through his own writing and a workshop he taught at San Francisco's Small Press Traffic Literary Arts Center in the 1980s, Glück helped shape what became known as "New Narrative," a movement that included his friends and colleagues Kathy Acker, Dennis Cooper, Kevin Killian, and Dodie Bellamy.