Tuesday, April 29, 2014

"Skulls" by M. Allen Cunningham

A reading of "Skulls," which is part of something longer. Accompanying artwork by Nathan Shields.

Sunday, April 20, 2014

M. Allen Cunningham's Partisans Shortlisted

Aqueous Books announced today the shortlist for the 2014 Flann O'Brien Award for Innovative Fiction, and among the six titles is M. Allen Cunningham's Partisans.

How to describe Partisans? Maybe like so:
A lost work by the mysterious writer G.P. Leed, Partisans is a book in two alternating parts, one part being the story of a sole surviving resistance fighter (from an unspecified war in an unspecified time) as he wanders war-torn landscapes in search of a new life. The other part of Partisans derives from Leed’s own private notebooks. M. Allen Cunningham has painstakingly edited the manuscript according to Leed’s designs as indicated in papers discovered after his disappearance, and the whole work creates a unique dialectic that is hard to convey in a mere synopsis. But this miraculously surviving work is long overdue for publication. 
It's an honor to be included in the O'Brien Award shortlist.

On the basis of an excerpt from Partisans, Cunningham was recently awarded a 2014 residency at Yaddo.