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Amerikan Krazy by Henry James Korn

Henry James Korn's debut novel Amerikan Krazy — Henry James Korn’s debut novel *Amerikan Krazy*

The novel the shattered American psyche has been waiting for.

To shoot or not to shoot?
To make pressure cooker bombs, or not make pressure cooker bombs?
To embrace or spurn a blond beauty who might blow their cover if they let her into the leadership of the Central Committee?

These are the questions that haunt the savage soldiers that comprise the San Diego 3, a trio of PTSD-scarred, love-starved Vietnam veterans who are on the trail of President Kennedy’s killers while serving as East Asia Veterans Against Violence activists and founders of a commune in Mexico.

Despite escaping neo-fascist “Amerika” to remote reaches south of the border, Herbert Horn, a wounded Marine vet, cannot escape his lifelong preoccupation with the personal meaning of JFK’s brutal public execution and why he failed to sabotage an evil empire by assassinating the Presidential candidate Senator Honus T. Rhinelander Junior at Founding Father Land Theme Park when he had a golden opportunity. As the years pass, Horn’s guilt deepens as he ponders the human suffering that would have been averted had he found the courage to fend off his fair-haired lady friend’s pleas and get off a kill shot. With every egregious occurrence such as the Rhinelander financed rape of Costa Rica; the Rhinelander-enabled Taliban takeover of Kyrgyzstan; a Rhinelander presidential successor installed by fiat of the Supreme Court; and redistribution of America’s wealth to a trans-national corporate cabal, Herb Horn’s remorse regarding his cowardice at the moment of truth escalates in an explosive manner.

Amerikan Krazy interprets the meaning of power in post modern Amerika. By turning political writing into art, Henry James Korn begins where Jules Verne, George Orwell and Edward Abbey left off.

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Recent and Upcoming Books

Amerikan Krazy by Henry James Korn

Henry James Korn‘s debut novel is available in hardcover on Febrary 22, 2016.

“Korn’s Amerikan Krazy is a zany, hard-charging, and tasty concoction laced with substantial doses of passionate and legitimate rage regarding the maddening features of contemporary American life combining darkness and hilarity in the manner of David Lynch and Tim Burton.”
-Dr. Spencer C. Olin, Professor Emeritus, History, University of California, Irvine

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Muhammad Ali Retrospective by Henry James Korn

With the republication of this book, we celebrate the life and legacy of “The Greatest”.

“Muhammad Ali Retrospective is an unusual and provocative view of an unusual and provocative subject: this daring blend of fact, whimsy and outrageous speculation may be the only sensible way to approach a man who is never what he seems.”
-Robert Lipsyte

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Proceedings of the National Academy of the Avant Garde

“I am amazed. Not only is Proceedings of the National Academy of the Avant Garde the only funny example of experimental fiction I have ever laid eyes on, it is the only example of experimental art in any form that I’ve seen in years that I thought was really good. Give us more, Mr. Korn and mark my words they won’t be calling you experimental for long.”
-P.J. O’Rourke

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The Pontoon Manifesto, a digital edition

According to Richard Kostelanetz, critic, curator, editor, and visual poet, Henry James Korn‘s The Pontoon Manifesto is a pioneering modular fiction. This late 1960’s literary experiment anticipated major themes, characters, and plot points in Korn’s 2016 debut novel Amerikan Krazy. The Pontoon Manifesto was initially floated in a pair of early 1970’s paperback offshoots of New American Review.

Forty-five years on, we present a new unlimited edition electronic Pontoon powered by an automatic randomizer which reorders the paragraphs at the click of a button.

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Exact Change: Short Fiction by Henry James Korn

For the first time ever, Exact Change is now available in e-book format.

“New approaches to fiction include Henry James Korn’s Exact Change. An opener will indicate his sardonic style: ‘King Kong is a great cook. Not just competent, or a good cook, though this would itself be remarkable considering his great girth and unopposable thumb, but a truly wonderful chef.’”
–Bill Katz, Best Small Press Titles of 1974, Library Journal

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Brief Reviews

“A fictional house of cards designed to destroy the everlasting sanity of librarians everywhere.”

“The higher comic vision of life,” writes Bergson scholar Wylie Sypher in The Meanings of Comedy, “is humane and an achievement of man as a social being.” Avant garde comic art remains our best, conceivably our only response, to an increasingly fragmentary world over which our individual control is minimal.

So now we have a publication by Henry James Korn with an oxymoronic title embracing programmed immortality, nostalgia for the future, and fluorescent chicken bones. But art exists where art is perceived and anything can be art at that point where we remove the object from the realm of the practical and personalize it though our own esthetics. Our misperceptions occur because we allow our reactions to be institutionalized and enslaved to official certifications of validity represented by the multiple choice and essay questions that Korn appends to his text in order to encourage reader response. “You cannot-a kid me, dere ain’t no sanity clause,” is the way Chico Marx expressed his opposition to authority in a Night at the Opera which Henry James Korn takes as a motto for his Proceedings. Elsewhere, Korn writes of two men in a room singing loudly, each in response to the other, filling the room with alternate balloons of sound. “Sometimes,” writes Korn, “we call this Opera and other times it’s the on-going process of life itself.’ Korn evidently understands much of what Franz Kafka was getting at in his notebooks when he explained he extravagantly exaggerated fictional situations purely in the interests of advancing clarity.

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