The Final Dream & Other Fictions
By Daniel Pearlman
Permeable Press, 1995
$15.00 [S&H free], trade paper, 268 pages
ISBN: 1-882633-05-9
A single story by Daniel Pearlman signals the world that here's a rare and wonderful talent. -Joe R. Lansdale
It is extraordinary that it took a small press-even a first-rate one like Permeable with its growing list of elegantly designed top-of-the-avant-pops novels, collections, and chapbooks-to bring this assembly of wonderfully alive stuff, accompanied by seven haunting woodcuts by Jill Tyler, into the world.
Where else except at the publishing fringes might one find stories in which interspecies lust leads a professor to rethink the end-of-the-millennium sexscape; children donate their organs to sick members of endangered species; people over eighty who fail to accrue enough "life points" through acts of social value are put down; it goes against decorum on a post-burial earth to inter your loved ones; an aesthete ponders the ramifications of time-dilation on a manned expedition to Tau Ceti; a pregnant teacher crawls out from under a pile of massacred bodies in a rural town to discover the insectile nature of what it means to be human; a new mother must decide which of her babies to kill since there are only enough nonrenewable resources on the planet for one; punk rockers turn out to be dimension-hopping criminals; pla(y)giarism turns out to be a way of life; policemen have the staying power of Jason in Friday the 13th; a traffic violator buys a smart car to prevent him from breaking the law again; and a professional dreamist dreams diurnally for a billion and a half people, turning their night-terrors into gentle entertainment, painting directly on their cerebral cortices? --Lance Olsen
Black Flames
A Novel by Daniel Pearlman
White Pine Press, 1997
$14.00 [S&H free], trade paper, 191 pages
ISBN: 1-877727-63-6
Review from BOOKLIST (Jan/97): [Starred review: (star = highly recommended)] Hector Favallone is retiring from a small New England college. But Hector is not concerned with planning his future. Instead, he is obsessed with his much younger wife, whom he suspects of adultery. Pedant and buffoon, Hector searches for evidence of her unfaithfulness, only to find, tucked among her undergarments, torturously detailed and hilarious evidence of many sexual escapades. So begins Hector's wild, self-deluded campaign to right the many wrongs in his life, a quixotic journey that becomes increasingly hallucinatory. Linguist Hector's work, now missing, centered on proving the close relationship between the Basque and Georgian languages. Hector believes it stolen by the KGB or ETA; his chairman suspects the research was a fantasy. As Hector pursues his wife and her imagined lover, his mind also regresses to the period when he was one of Mussolini's Black Shirts, aiding Franco in the Battle of Guadalajara. Throughout, Pearlman creates wonderful juxtapositions: Hector's silly, erudite language and the speech of his teenage children, his cosmopolitan memories laid over a normal American town. A richly comic gem. --Brian Kenney
Review from PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY, 12/9/96, p.61:
For his first novel, Pearlman, an Ezra Pound scholar at the University of Rhode Island in Kingston and author of an SF collection (The Final Dream and Other Fictions), chooses the setting he knows best-a small New England university. Hector Dinara Favallone is a paranoid, xenophobic, devoutly anti-Communist professor who speaks 27 languages. He is also a case study in hubris, priding himself on having once been a soldier; even as he nears academic retirement, he maintains a rigid military mentality. Yet as the book proceeds, it becomes clear that Hector's life with Mussolini's Black Shirts during the Spanish Civil War was not all that he wished it was or portrays it to be-for Hector is a coward. Through hallucinatory flashbacks, he relives his experiences, and his attempts at justifying his past and present actions are deluded, ironic and comically moving. Pearlman handles his material smartly, stretching the comedic limits of every situation and allowing the most irascible of characters to be humorous and even, occasionally, sympathetic. This novel is a slap in the face to self-obsessed academics who dwell in the past. Erudite and irreverently composed, it just might teach readers a valuable lesson.
The Best-Known Man in the World & Other Misfits
By Daniel Pearlman
Aardwolf Press, 2001
$15.00 [S&H free], trade paper, 256 pp.
ISBN 0-9706225-0-3
Click here to see excerpts and reviews.
A round-up of a dozen previously uncollected stories plucked from the cracks in reality's pavement. Science Fiction Chronicle, February 2002:
Voted among the Best Story Collections of 2001
ONE REVIEWER'S ADVANCE COMMENT:
'Daniel Pearlman's stories are perfectly-crafted gems. They are wry and wise, funny and sad--impossibly, all at the same time. Sometimes they remind me of Elizabeth Bowen, sometimes T. Coraghessan Boyle. But that's a cop-out: they are uniquely Pearlman's. They are stories I treasure.'
JACK DANN, Nebula and World Fantasy Award winner
Review column, Scary Books, FLESH & BLOOD (#13;
Fall 2003) p. 26, by Darrell Schweitzer:
Of Books and Bookoids, a Mission Statement
... I discovered a wonderful writer named Daniel Pearlman, whose THE BEST-KNOWN MAN IN THE WORLD & OTHER MISFITS (Aardwolf Press, 2001, $14.95) I highly recommend. ... Of course [I] have heard of the back-cover quoters, Paul DiFilippo, Joe R. Lansdale, Jeff VanderMeer, and Jack Dann.
Those guys may have gotten there first, but what they've found, lost and buried in the wastelands, is a gem of a book, not a diamond-in-the-rough which needs work, but an actual finished, polished, gem. ...
Washington Post, Sunday, 10/28/01.
Excerpt from a 4-book review by John Clute:
It is not easy, at first, to trust Daniel Pearlman. The stories in The Best-Known Man in the World, and Other Misfits (Aardwolf; paperback, $14.95) are all based on conceits, premises that seem at times fatally heavy. But then, slowly, we begin to see the light. For Pearlman, conceits are not postmodernist exposures of arbitrariness of story, but instructions for arriving at the soul.
The title story (1995) is perhaps the least engaging. It is a Borgesian fable of a man who is so afraid of losing his self that, by obsessively recording every moment of his life, he creates nothing valuable in that life but the comic chaos of his obsessive record. But even here we find ourselves recognizing someone we do not wish to know but do. "The Vatican's Secret Cabinet" is a long joke about genitals, but the more the heroine learns, the more lovably raucous she gets. "Cogito, Ergo Sum" is a remarkably touching, psychologically innovative portrait of a woman so afraid of solitude that in her neediness she is intolerable to others; in the end she literally implodes.
"Over the H.I.L.L." is sarcastic science fiction about genetic predetermination of lifespans but ends in a gloriously raucous escape. In "The Colonel's Jeep" a German colonel, caught in the retreat from Russia, finds himself using Jewish magic out of Isaac Bashevis Singer to save his jeep: but he also finds himself in a story he cannot control, which kills him. "Zeno Evil" is a rewrite of Ambrose Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" in terms of pre-Socratic philosophy.
It all sounds too much, but it is not. Every single conceit in Pearlman's bright book gets transformed into story, though sometimes just barely. And every story knows when to stop. It is a rich world of the fantastic that can offer wares and warinesses as diverse and fascinating as the gifts we have been afforded by ... Daniel Pearlman.
A novel by Daniel Pearlman
MEMIMI, Wildside Press, 2003; hardcover ISBN: 1-894815-69-6; $29.95
Click to order from Wildside Press
Publisher's Weekly review, Nov. 2003:
MEMINI
Daniel Pearlman. Prime (www.primebooks.net), $29.95 (328p)
ISBN 1-894815-69-6;
Pearlman (The Final Dream & Other Fictions) goes for the satirical
jugular in this often hilarious ... Swiftian exercise, full of Joycean
wordplay. In the author's unrelenting cyberpunk dystopia, Memini and two
other large corporations or "conglobulates," Mishugi and Occipet,
control a world divided into two groups: brain-damaged "tekkies" and
grumbling but mentally sound "oldfolks." Memini's in trouble because its
president is convinced that he's a high school student confounded by a
hostile board of education. Readers should be prepared for a whirlwind
ride with no pause for breath. (Nov.)
From On Books, By Paul DiFilippo, pp. 139-40
Imagine a world run by victims of Alzheimer's disease, and you'll have a pretty good idea of the black-humored premise of Daniel Pearlman's brash and sardonic novel Memini (Prime Books, hardcover, $29.95, 326 pages, ISBN 1-894815-69-6). Thanks to the widespread use of drugs that enhance intelligence while they simultaneously eradicate short-term memory retention and even long-term memory traces, the upper echelons of Pearlman's future are all addled savants whose lives stay on track only thanks to Meminet. Meminet is an AI that coordinates a system of "flappers" and "skeeters," individual units that continually whisper necessary data into the ears of the "frags." Reminding them of their very identities and histories, updating them on interpersonal relationships, Meminet insures that the world continues to function. But President Lester Barton, head of the Memini "conglobulate," is slipping out of control into paranoid delusions, and will soon trigger global disaster. Unless a low-level non-frag, Stewart Bridges, can maneuver his way through the labyrinth of frag politics and restore some stability to the Rube-Goldberg system. Pearlman's inventiveness with language and his fecund, ultra-logical extrapolations of his initial premise call to mind the classic early work of Philip Dick and the biting satires of Fritz Leiber. His ability to inhabit the viewpoints of the "swiss-cheese brain" executives is impressive, as are his depictions of such everyday people as Stewart's parents. All in all, this novel is a rousing parody of our own screwball society, where handlers and spin doctors guide our elected officials, celebrities, and experts through minefields of shattered discourse.
