The Possibility of Music is an imaginative reconstruction of America in the early 21st century. What would our post-9/11 society look like if it were viewed through a series of funhouse mirrors?

Each of Stephen-Paul Martin’s stories is a response to this question, a prose exploration that redefines what it means to write fiction in a world in which the Sistein Chapel has become the Mall of America. Nightmarish at times, playfully amusing at others, Martin’s prose is relentlessly inventive and challenging, relocating the experimental tradition of Joyce, Kafka, Borges, and Marquez in a contemporary context in which intelligent communication has become both impossible and increasingly necessary.

"I’d always told myself that if I ever wrote my own music," the narrator of one story says, "every composition would become its own distinct struggle with aesthetic questions that emerged as the process unfolded." In good part, that’s what animates The Possibility of Music, a book in which John Coltrane’s "Love Supreme" moves through characters and stories like a soundtrack.

 

Stephen-Paul Martin (Things, Invading Reagan, Until it Changes), fiction (Instead of Confusion, the Gothic Twilight) , and nonfiction. Currently Professor of English at San Diego State University, from 1980— 1996 he edited Central Park magazine, and taught at New York University.