ANTI-OEDIPUS PRESS: Sacred Outcast

Anti-Oedipus Press • 2017

Paperback: 125 pages • 5 x 8 • $12.95 • ISBN 978-0-9905733-9-5

BOOK DESCRIPTION

Thirty-five years ago, American author Harold Jaffe traveled throughout India. The place that made the strongest impression on him was the holy Hindu city of Varanasi (also known as Benares or Kashi). In 2015, he returned to Varanasi for six months and wrote Sacred Outcast: Dispatches from India, which, unexpectedly, melded his current stay with his India travels over three decades ago. The “dispatches" combine close description with narrative, dialogue, fantasy, and an ongoing interrogation of the caste system. In times when official cruelty dominates, Jaffe uncovers the sacred beauty of an oppressed, wounded people, chronicling their maladies and long suffering.

PRAISE FOR SACRED OUTCAST & HAROLD JAFFE

"When the American writer returns to the holy Hindu city of Varanasi he travels not only through space but time. Chronicling injustices and maladies along the way, he finds also the sacred beauty of the wounded . . . Jaffe locates the sacred among 'untouchables with mobiles,' among the survivors in a leper colony, in 'a dark-skinned, low-caste little girl, maybe five years old, who stands barefoot on the stone ghat facing the Ganges playing notes on a wooden flute.' This is a beautiful book." —Ilya Kaminsky

"Harold Jaffe is a master storyteller, weaving personal experiences and impressions with a deep knowledge of place and history. His language is beautiful and seductive. Sacred Outcast reveals and explores Varanasi on many levels and opens the reader to a spacious understanding." —Catherine Jansen

"Harold Jaffe has been by turns our coffee and our Courvoisier—our wake-up call and delectation. In the age of Trump, he's our water, Sacred Outcast the unfiltered stuff from deep beneath our blasted surface." —Lawrence-Min Bui Davis

“Jaffe’s portraits of the dispossessed are moving, insightful glimpses of the human spirit under stress.” —New York Times Book Review

“Jaffe is to fiction what Merce Cunningham is to dance, what John Cage is to verbal-musical presentation.” —Newsday

“As always, Jaffe’s writing is moving, comical, marvelously deft.” —Washington Post

“Jaffe’s writing is like no one else writing today.” —American Book Review

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

HAROLD JAFFE is the author of 26 volumes of fiction, novels, docufiction and essays, most recently Goosestep, Induced Coma, Death Café, Anti-Twitter: 150 50-Word Stories, OD, Paris 60, Revolutionary Brain and Othello Blues. His books have been translated into 15 languages and he has received many accolades, among them two NEA grants, two Fulbright fellowships and three Pushcart Prizes. Jaffe teaches literature at San Diego State University and is editor-in-chief of Fiction International.

OTHER ANTI-OEDIPAL TITLES BY HAROLD JAFFE

Death Café

Induced Coma