Jan Herman

My correspondence with writers and poets of the Beat, post-Beat and Fluxus periods, along with other literary artifacts, was acquired by Northwestern University Library. In case you’re interested, the collection is described in the library’s cleverly named Jan Herman Archive.

My literary taste in fiction writers has run to Joseph Conrad, William Burroughs, Nelson Algren, Graham Greene, John Le Carré, and Cormac McCarthy. I have also loved reading Frank Harris, whose word portraits of artists and writers are too little known. But their books are not necessarily what I’ve been reading lately.

My biography of the Hollywood director William Wyler, A Talent for Trouble, is available as an ebook at Amazon and an ebook on iTunes at the Apple store. Putnam published it in hardcover, and Da Capo Press published it in paperback.

I have written several other books, including The Z Collection: Portraits & Sketches, published by Blue Wind Press in an American edition and by Moloko Print in a new European edition.

A collection of theater criticism, published in two volumes, is also available: Second Nights (Vol.1) and Second Nights (Vol. 2).

New European edition
of The Z Collection

Recently I’ve been writing a cycle of “deformed sonnets.” You can read a collection of them in Your Obituary Is Waiting.

Some of the poems have also been published by Peter Engstler Verlag in a bi-lingual English-German edition titled FOURTEEN: Deformed Sonnets. (The German translations are by Gregor Pott.) Other poems in the cycle have been published in The Way the Lines Break, and in handmade limited editions by Cold Turkey Press. Jay Jeff Jones’s review of Your Obituary Is Waiting appeared on Amazon in the U.K:

And this message came from Charles Plymell:

Moloko+ has published an enhanced facsimile edition of my old project Brion Gysin Let the Mice In, and in case anyone is interested, Collateral Damage: The Daily History of a Blog, traces blogposts of mine from more than a decade ago with a foreword by William Osborne. “If there is a single ethos that defines this collection of blog entries,” he writes, “it is that the arts do not exist in a vacuum, that culture is holistically connected to every aspect of society. … This blog captured the American cultural zeitgeist in the aftermath of 9/11. Written in Manhattan during a 14-month period between May 2002 and July 2003, it provided witty, detailed, atmospheric snapshots of a wide cross-section of the arts, media, and politics during a pivotal time in U.S. history, attracting millions of readers as the most popular blog by far during the early years of MSNBC.com.”

I am also the co-author of the experimental fiction Cut Up or Shut Up, a collaboration with Carl Weissner and Jurgen Ploog (and with a “tickertape” intro by William S. Burroughs).

In addition to Brion Gysin Let the Mice In, co-written by Gysin, Burroughs and Ian Sommerville (Something Else Press), I’ve edited as well The Something Else Yearbook, an anthology of the arts.