The Fabulous Dead

THE FABULOUS DEAD is a collection of very short stories, that might belong to the imaginary genre of "un-historical fiction," a type of literature that deals with the undoing of history and its reweaving into poetic images resembling surreal fables. In THE FABULOUS DEAD, famous (and fabulous) dead characters find themselves in dream-like situations or influence the living in unexpected ways. Brahms is a sauerkraut addict having telephone troubles, Marlene Dietrich lives in an ice-cream freezer, Claude Francois becomes the reason for a revolution, Wittgenstein is boiling in a pot of soup, Scott of the Antarctic wants to learn the piano, princess Alexandra of Bavaria decides to take a job as a pianist on a cruise-ship, Julius Caesar is humiliated by a bowl of gutted fish and a mysterious seagull, Virginia Woolf, Sarah Kane and Sylvia Plath drink bloody Marys in the living room, Gus Grissom has a secret affair with Dante's Beatrice. The result is an intricate mosaic of thoughts seeking their stories, almost forcing themselves into them; thoughts on identity, individuality, uniqueness, life-purposes and lives wasted or enjoyed. THE FABULOUS DEAD is, perhaps above all, a ball-masque oscillating between the eternal and the ephemeral.