Here is the much-missed David Markson, author of Wittgenstein’s Mistress and other great, unclassifiable works, on Kenneth Bernard, in Little Star Weekly this week:
One of the most relentlessly and funnily experimental writers of our time. Kenneth Bernard is one of the most gloriously antic fiction writers we possess. Think of Salvador Dali or Giorgio de Chirico having written stories instead of painting and you are half way there. His pages have simultaneously awed and delighted me for years.
Kenneth Bernard is best known for the avant-garde plays he began writing in the 1960s for John Vaccaro’s Play-House of the Ridiculous. His plays, short prose, and poems, have been collected in eleven books, including The Baboon in the Nightclub, the novel From the District File, Clown at Wall: A Kenneth Bernard Reader, and, most recently, The Man In The Stretcher: Previously Uncollected Short Fiction. His poem in Little Star Weekly is from a series based on (coincidentally?) Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, of which four more appeared in Little Star #3 (2012)
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