Time’s Wallet Steve Katz
Time’s Wallet is a memoir written in discrete pieces, “memoirrhoids.” The 54 short bits cover the variety and extent of a life from 1935 to the present, from Manhattan by various routes to Denver, Colorado. The work presents itself not as a narrative arc, but as memory itself occurs, in brief stories rising more or less at random in the mind. Each remembered narrative is allowed to resolve itself through its own form, and that variety creates a different overall texture. Each of the “stories” is transparent in itself, but they add up to a fertile opacity that is the ineluctable vitality of a life, and the impenetrable presence, the “here it is,” of art.
Steve Katz is one of the founders of Fiction Collective (FC2) and he started the short-lived PIIF (Projects In Innovative Fiction) with Walter Abish, Clarence Major, and Michael Stephens. He taught creative writing and literature at Cornell University, Brooklyn College, Queens College, The University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop, The University of Notre Dame, and The University of Colorado in Boulder, from which he retired in 2003.
from Fanny Howe: This beneficent account of a life spent among artists, writers and musicians from the American 60’s through the 90’s—by a writer of bracing fiction—is a testament to its own qualities. I, reading, remembered ‘the day’ and could see clearly now, without dolor or fever, what it was all about. Steve Katz has always served it straight.
from R.M. Berry: The episodes of Time’s Wallet are as brief and lasting as memory. Pynchon, Nabokov, Berryman, Sukenick, W.D. Snodgrass, Richard Serra, all appear, surrounded by sensitive portraits of less famous names. Katz treats each with self-deprecating candor, never subliming his own adventures but alive to the madness of everything important. Time’s Wallet reprises the pleasure of everything he has ever written, and yet it is utterly singular. No one who cares about America’s literary and art scene in the sixties should fail to read it.
ISBN 978-1933996-22-6