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Alain Arias-Misson (1976)

Alain Arias-Misson is a truly “mid-Atlantic” literary artist, an heir to both continents, publishing pieces both verbal and visual here and abroad. A Harvard-educated classicist, he learned from visual poetry (especially his large word-filled canvases) how to re-enter his initial medium, the spine-bound book, with a new, transcendent sense of possibility. His first novel, Confessions of a Murder, Rapist, Fascist, Bomber, Thief (1974), is an extraordinary volume that engages contemporary history in an imaginative unprecedented way. Thanks to its structure—a series of fictionalized glosses on reproduced newspaper clipping—this book is disturbing both visually and verbally; no one reading the Confessions will forget it. What is stylistically special about this novel is the exploitation of journalism, which is mundane, for the sake of art, which is not. The result of Arais-Misson’s pitting his imagination against history is a coherent portrait of gratuitous violence in our time.