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James Chapman (born 1955) is an American novelist and publisher. He has lived in New York City since 1978, and is the author of six novels to date:
- Our Plague (A Film from New York) *
- Walls Collide as You Expand, Dwarf Maple *
- (Pray the Electrons Back to Sand) *
- Candyland It's Cool to Feed on Your Friends *
- I Forbid Your Recurring Dream! *
- [2006
His novels generally combine experimental technique with a direct emotionality, often dealing with the anguish inherent in human communication. Excerpted in many print and online magazines, his work has been nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize.
Themes
Several of the novels have had as an ongoing theme the place of the artist in the world. In his first novel, Our Plague, the protagonist is a scene-making filmmaker awash in alienation. Candyland deals with a photographer who loses his friends for the crime of having exploited them for his art. Daughters heroine dabbles in all manner of self-expression, but loses faith in each form, and ends in a solitary silence. And Stet', Chapman's most ambitious book, constitutes a kind of summing-up of all his previous work, in the form of a "Russian novel" that deals with a Soviet artist whose art is (fatally) private and solitary.
It is evident from the considerable pessimism at the close of both Candyland and Daughter, as well as the advancement of a kind of Buddhist detachment as a solution for the embattled artist in Stet, that Chapman's relationship to his own career and audience is an increasingly problematic one. Excerpts of his forthcoming novella-as-libretto, rather ominously titled How is This Going to Continue?, seem to carry the artist-figure, a composer this time, still further into private grief and alienation; the style is also unprecedented in his work, now consisting entirely of quotations from other sources, only some of which are invented. And in a work-in-progress called Degenerescence, he appears to have finally turned away from the last of his own recognizable mannerisms, in favor of a pseudo-ancient repetitive incantation, what might be called home-made Sumerian myth.
As Publisher
Chapman also operates Fugue State Press, a publisher of "advanced and experimental fiction" which has published work by Andre Malraux, W. B. Keckler, Randie Lipkin, Prakash Kona, Noah Cicero, Eckhard Gerdes, Tim Miller, Joshua Cohen, and others.
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