DEFOE New from Sun & Moon Press (6026 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90036)
distributed by Small Press Distribution, Consortium, and at select bookstores

DEFOE, by Leslie Scalapino,
Classics 46, 365 pages, $12.95; ISBN # 1-55713-163-5


DEFOE, Leslie Scalapino's new fiction, is an epic where images of battle become meditations, an epic wherein events flap in silence as the narrative moves toward a place where the reader and text become one. The images of this fiction don't resemble events, but are new occurences in time and space. In Part I, Waking Life, the heroine, in love with James Dean, discovers herself in a desert pocked with fires in which the "henna man"- a drug dealer- is being carried in a white cocoon. And throughout Scalapino's work the reader is taken into a world where the written word creates " an event retrieved from so far back that it is separated from its memory." While not resembling reality/history, the fictionalizing induces the simplest movement possible in its whole expanded, unique structure, to change real past and present.