The stories in Denny Smith use events in the life of Robert Glück as a ground for the expansion of empathy and intellect. These events include burglary, sex, conversation, reading, humiliation, child raising, and porn. Self-absorbed, the stories are nevertheless profoundly communal. As William Burroughs said of Glück's earlier novel, Jack the Modernist, "in this book self-exploration is so precise it becomes impersonal."

Excerpt:
"A few nights before, in bed, I felt something travel over my ear and fall across my eyes. I opened them and organized the information of all those legs into a spider and flung it away with a shout. But I retained the memory as an auspicious moment, part of my allotment of good luck, and I thought about it at the café, the dry delicacy of the spider, as though a dry leaf had the will to move, a small lament, and how it fell across my eyelids as though to resemble their delicacy. Nothing uncanny could be more elegant. The spider was on the side of the sapphires. Their witty joy turns the world upside down. I felt in our breakup the same possibility, the same tickle."
—from "Denny Smith"

Author Bio:
Robert Glück is the author of the novels Margery Kempe (Serpent's Tail Publishing, 1994), Jack the Modernist (Serpent's Tail Publishing, 1995), and three collections of prose and poetry: Reader (Lapis Press, 1989), Elements of a Coffee Service (Four Seasons Foundation, 1983), and Denny Smith (Clear Cut Press, 2004). He lives in San Francisco and teaches at San Francisco State University, where he is an editor of the online journal Narrativity.

Through his own writing and a workshop he taught at San Francisco's Small Press Traffic Literary Arts Center in the 1980s, Glück helped shape what became known as "New Narrative," a movement that included his friends and colleagues Kathy Acker, Dennis Cooper, and Dodie Bellamy. An essay by Glück about the social history of that practice can be read online. (While you're there, you should also read Kevin Killian's account of the same.) In addition, Earl Jackson's interview with Glück is online at Another Scene. Michel Foucault esteemed Glück as one of the world's greatest writers about sex. "Remember," Glück pointed out in an e-mail to Clear Cut, "impurity is Robert spelled backward."