JUMP-CUTS, PORTHOLES, METAFICTIONS

HP Tinker’s work is about as far removed from an Aesopic fable
as one can imagine, yet it still contains the same heady mixture
of the fabulous and the surreal. His collection of what I would
call post-fabulist metafictions, The Swank Bisexual Wine Bar of
Modernity is a heady intersection of metafictional mischief and
garrulous intellect. After reading his work, the world around us
– a series of interpolations, bifurcations, jump-cuts and portholes
to the symbolic and literary order, if HP Tinker is to be
believed – begins to take on a whole new complexion. Unlike
the pared-down language of Blake Butler, HP Tinker allows
as much as possible to filter into his writing, and his influences
are wide-ranging, from Paul Gauguin via Tina Turner, Jacques
Derrida, Thomas Pynchon, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr
to Morrissey, creating a series of fictions that explain their own
unique purpose as they are written. Even if we just read some
of the titles of his stories recently published in Ambit65, we start
to see a clearer picture of just where HP Tinker’s imagination
lies: ‘Son of Sinbad’, ‘Winter Kills Love Among Other Things’,
‘The Dead Palace’, ‘At The End of the Hellenic Period’, ‘The Fall
of Bohemia’, ‘The Modernist Uprising’ and ‘Alice in Time &
Space and Various Major Cities’. Indeed it’s a grand symphony
of intertextuality, tomfoolery and theoretical intent...


Extract from Lee Rourke's A Brief History of Fables: From Aesop to Flash Fiction, Hesperus Press. OUT NOW.