Tales from a Theory of Angels and Other Writings

Franz Kamin (1941-2010) was an American writer, composer, poet, performance-installation artist, and pianist whose startling avant-garde works created multiple new genres. This collection incorporates his two main previous books--Ann Margret Loves You and Other Psychotopological Diversions (1980) and Scribble Death (1986)--plus his posthumous writing originally collected as Tales From The Theory of Angels. Poet Jackson Mac Low called him "a uniquely multidimensional artist and thinker" whose "prose narratives and performance works combining several media... playfully and seriously incorporate... concepts and procedures derived from such fields as topology and linguistics," while at the same time he was "a deeply emotional romantic artist." Scribble Death has been called "a post-modern Gothic experimental novel" interlacing dream-narrative with death-event vignettes and revelations concerning the composition of the text. He links the scribbling of children, artists and dreamers with the hopes and terrors of obsession and delirium. Through all of this one may almost detect a somber chuckling from the authorial domain. In a Baudelairean sense, Kamin extends the comic to new ranges of the grotesque.