New Fiction Journal (NFJ) Launch: A Brief Intro

NFJ is all about fiction and fiction writing. Old fiction written in a new way and challenging/defying our pre-existing conceptions about this most popular form of the world literature. It is dangerous stuff being composed by very mobile imaginative minds across a fast-shrinking globe by some very talented writers---old and emerging. The shock value can be enormous---2000 watts of raw, white energy, some may say, delivered directly to the solar plexus, for better effect. The pulsating electric charge carried in that simple innocuous graphic piece on a white paper can give a fundamental jolt to all your ossified thinking/ perceiving modes and make your mental dish-antennae to rotate fast in order to catch and register every second of the super-fast trajectory of a hurtling tornado. In fact, to change the metaphor again, it places you as a helpless participant, suddenly and without any previous warnings, in the epicenter of a whirlpool of conflicting emotions, feelings, settings and moods, and, wants you as the participating reader to mentally record every atom falling on your fine but cluttered mind. Tough job? But that is how new creative writing has been doing all these past years and decades in last few centuries…shock. Metaphysical poets precisely did that. Browning did that. Cervantes and Joyce did that in their own style. It is different matter that the high-voltage shock, very soon, becomes blasé and gradually gets incorporated in the commercial culture as hallowed academic canon--- becoming mundane through routine and repetitive inane teaching/research activities that can easily kill the best creative stuff in the class room by the most unimaginative and boring men and women, with inadequate literary skills and inclinations, treating themselves very seriously--- and thus losing its earlier aura, integrity, freshness of vision, an enduring intellectual symbolism and thrilling youthful appeal to a minor group of wide-eyed consumers. The NFJ wants screaming fiction: a piece of writing that is unhappy with the deterministic narrow framework of story-telling decided by previous generation(s) of writers, literary editors and academics---that is all the arbiters of tastes for you. The ideal New Writer (NW) for us at NFJ is typically impatient---the way our beloved Derrida was with the western logos and everything foundational, metaphysical and fixed. He was, as his comrades gleefully point out, unhappy with everybody except himself. So the poor chap deconstructed everything sacred, static and traditional in one single sweep---to the utter delight of the restive Americans in perpetual search for something new and challenging to replace the earlier pantheon of the new and exciting in their national culture of the instant gratification---and got himself installed as the new demi-god of the western cultural world. He spoke and everybody thought he as the official spokesperson held the secret keys to all the sacred civilizational truths till rediscovered Bakhtin demolished the French in the little arena of competitive ideas. The NW is more or less like these icons, ready to demolish and then, willingly or unwillingly, become enshrined in the popular mythologies. Something can not be helped. To-day’s radical is to-morrow’s conservative. Regis Debray syndrome? Yeah. All the Parisian intellectuals of some significance of the 60s and 70s were just that before the allure of the establishment caught up with them and claimed them as apologetic defenders of the faith. But this is the second painful part of being a successful public figure of a market economy. For us, that early rebellion is still relevant and any way, youthful radicalism part is always better of a great career than the geriatric status quoits mindset of a failed revolutionary; better a reformed rebel than no rebel and die as a happy, complacent and wealthy organic man of the wicked world. Radicals change the world; some make it in their image, others, however, become its mirror-image. Some subversion is important for our mental health. It can be at purely thought level or formal or linguistic one…murder to create thing, you know. The idea is to break out of old moulds…and create new ones till somebody else comes and does it for you what you did to your holy predecessors. But that is life any way. Our kids always treat us as scum of the earth and rebel, only to get sucked in the same mire and become same as us. Little ironies of life!
It is New Fiction or NF we are on the look out for our journal, preferably composed in English for varied audiences across the English-speaking world; restive audiences eager to sample shifting perspectives, dialogic voices and conflicting view-points; that startling solid Pound-like crisp image or powerful arresting visual; the haunting music of carefully-crafted lines near a sea shore or in solitude of mind or heart, in brief, white creativity originating and erupting forcefully in multiple cultural locations and active, feverish finer mindscapes that soar in places, whether you like it or not, only few can visit. NF, by definition, is restless, cerebral, innovative, gravity-defying, Eureka-moment, multi-disciplinarian thing and is ready to challenge the overused dull lusterless decaying conventions and moribund boundaries of the art of fiction and fiction telling. It is to be edited by some very fine people: some venerable university dons, others about to become, while some young angry Osbornes wanting desperately to re-write their own histories in hot flushes of deep rage. If you think you have all the mixed cultural genes of Monet, Borges, Ginsberg and Guevara, to name but a few, you are welcome aboard the NFJ for a long and exciting mental journey across varied colourful landscapes conducted by the best fictionists of the time. In an instant, the eclectic experience will change from monochromatic to pure psychedelic. Send your shorts, micros, comments, interviews to our proposed half-yearly journal that is global in tastes and standards, and, of course, headed by an international edit team. Indian journals will not look the same again. We will provide the epochal and the revolutionary. The rest depends on God and our valued patrons on terra firma. Amen!