Album Zutique
A Jeff VanderMeer Interview
Album Zutique (sample story excerpt) is the first of a planned series of pocket books mainly focused on surreal and decadent literature. Jeff VanderMeer will serve as series editor and the editor of the first number. Thereafter, VanderMeer will enlist guest editors to edit subsequent numbers of this series. The emphasis will be on nonfiction as well as fiction. For purposes of continuity, each volume will have the same basic layout, with the typography used as the “cover art” and a different color scheme for each book.
Jeff VanderMeer talks to Claude Lalumière about Album Zutique, in this interview conducted over e-mail during the second half of April 2003.
Claude Lalumière: Can you explain how you came to conceive of developing the Album Zutique series?
Jeff VanderMeer: The Leviathan anthology series I created through the Ministry of Whimsy has gradually become more and more ritualistic and large. By which I mean it’s become something of a Ministry institution. It’s the Ministry’s aircraft carrier. I suddenly wondered if the Ministry needed a sloop as well—something more maneuverable and flexible. I was reading a new translation of Rimbaud’s poetry at the time and came across this idea of the Album Zutique. Album Zutique was an open poetry/prose journal that members of Rimbaud’s writing group wrote in, and apparently left around for passersby to read. The name resonated. Then it was just a matter of branding the series. I chose the small size, the typography-as-art cover approach, and the 200-pages-or-less constraint as a way to both brand the series and make it clearly different from Leviathan. And true to the idea of flexibility, Album Zutique is not bound to be an anthology. It can be a single-author collection of fiction or nonfiction, an anthology of African magic realists, etc. The length—50,000 words or less—makes editing an Album Zutique a much quicker experience. Theoretically, we could deploy an AZ within eight weeks of coming up with that particular number’s theme or idea. Much as we did with AZ#1.
Claude Lalumière: Why now? Are the times conducive to a “surreal & decadent” revival?
Jeff VanderMeer: I would say that the surreal and decadent have permeated the work of many contemporary authors, including such amazing writers as M. John Harrison and Rikki Ducornet. The work of China Miéville is clearly influenced by the surrealists and the decadents. I don’t see this as a revival so much as a cataloguing of material already being published in the mainstream and genre—but concentrating it in one place. I also see it as a way to bring international surrealism/decadence to the attention of U.S. readers.
Claude Lalumière: “Decadence” and “surrealism” are words that come with a lot of baggage and cultural associations. Not everyone means the same thing when they use them. What do you mean by them?
Jeff VanderMeer: I mean specifically the Decadent Movement extant in France and England around 1870 to 1915, and the subsequent Surrealist Movement prevalent initially from the 1920s until World War II. I also include the Chicago Surrealists from the 1960s on, and specific writers, like Angela Carter, who can be seen as one of the first writers to successfully apply surrealist techniques and manifestos to a plot-driven, causal storyline.
Decadent literature influenced the Surrealists, of course. In some ways, you’d have to say the Decadents were more successful writers than the early Surrealists—Breton could be a horrible bore, for example—but that Surrealism has since invaded even television commercials and become somewhat ubiquitous. We just don’t as often see it expressed in fiction without some diluting mechanism in place.
Claude Lalumière: Are there widespread interpretations of these terms—or cultural manifestations of such—that you find hinder your agenda?
Jeff VanderMeer: Not so far. We will, of course, stretch the interpretation of those terms to encompass work on the edges of Surrealism and Decadence. And there’s been some talk of including “magic realism” as a term if it’s necessary to include Borges and his ilk.
