Category: Publications

In 2016, Shane Anderson made a vow to live according to the four core values of the Golden State Warriors to escape a decade of defeats—including divorce, debilitating spinal surgery and a suicide attempt. The basketball team’s values of joy, mindfulness, compassion, and competition became Anderson’s guiding principles, providing him a lens to investigate a myriad of social, personal, philosophical, and political issues, such as homelessness, the promises and failures of rave culture, and the limits of self-help. Part memoir, part essay, and part chronicle of the greatest five-year stretch of a team in NBA history, After the Oracle depicts the makes and misses of one expat trying to make a life worth living.

“Basically nothing about this book should work — an earnest but unsentimental self-help basketball memoir of Berlin depravity, depression, and redemption? give me a break — but, by some occult miracle, it does, and it does with hilarity, beauty, the great pleasures of genrelessness, and ultimately something like real grace. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything like it, and I doubt I ever will again.” —Gideon Lewis-Kraus, author of A Sense of Direction

“After the Oracle is resolutely not a self-help book, but it is also the best self-help book you’ll ever read. It is ostensibly a book about basketball — and yes, it is about basketball! — but it is also about the biggest questions in the world, like what it takes to love and how to build a life. Part love letter to The Game, part self-searching memoir, part philosophical treatise, ultimately it is a roadmap for a deep interrogation of the self that suggests how personal and political transformations may be truly possible. In the tradition of the greatest sports writing, it is expansive, hilarious, and profound — yet it is also uniquely Shane Anderson. Intricately constructed, deeply poetic, vulnerable, real. An ode to basketball; an ode to joy.” —Elvia Wilk, author of Oval

“In this work Shane Anderson mines from the moment values that escape beyond the exigencies that seem to cradle the moment. He mines from the athleticism that which insinuates value that seems to overcome the compost that seems to shadow the moment. A seeming instant in time is mined for stunning life lessons it provides emitted as they are from crucial tangents that seem to occlude their greater extension.” —Will Alexander, author of Across the Vapour Gulf, Singing in Magnetic Hoofbeat, and others

“You can’t fake the funk on a nasty dunk and Shane Anderson’s post-oracular post-genre new book is proof.” —Joshua Cohen, author of The Netanyahus, Book of Numbers, and Witz

“When the Golden State Warriors started their legendary winning streak, Shane Anderson looked at their four core values (joy, mindfulness, compassion, competition) and saw how he could introduce them into his own life. Memoir and psychological text all in one, this book doesn’t preach about how to live your life; it just shows the reader the changes that Anderson tried to embody, and the struggles that came with them. His style is fresh and unique, his narrative is compelling, and his grasp on basketball makes for a powerful and effective read.”—Brad Costa, Boulder Book Store

“[A]s a study in the salvaging of a life, this small volume offers a fascinating and remarkable story of one man’s love of sport, devotion to a team, and how that saves his life.” —Richard Crepeau, New York Journal of Books

Work of experimental fiction published by Broken Dimanche Press.

These three texts manifest the schizoanalytic modelisation of subjectivity described by Félix Guattari in Chaosmosis, between material, energetic, and semiotic fluxes; concrete and abstract machines; virtual universes of value; and finite existential territories.  Together they explode our expectations by dizzying narrative the way John Zorn dizzies the saxophone, the way Marina Abramović dizzies the body, the way Ryan Trecartin dizzies the cinema.  As Anderson puts it, “ Stories are dead, performance is everything.”  And as Gertrude Stein put it, in anticipation of Études des Gottnarrenmaschinen, “He is expressing the time-sense of his contemporaries.” 

— Christopher Higgs, author of The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney     

étude |āˈt(y)o͞od|

noun

a short musical composition, typically for one instrument, designed as an exercise to improve the technique or demonstrate the skill of the player.

It’s not often that a collection of writing reaches as far and wide as Shane Anderson’s debut work, Études des Gottnarrenmaschinen. Broken Dimanche Press is extremely excited to be publishing this bold collection which includes three works that explore the boundaries of fiction and poetry. Utilising a plethora of devices – erasures, pseudo application forms, Oulipo constraints, and the limits of the paragraph – this is indeed a virtuoso collection that takes on the problems of (modern) travel, power relations, historical and mental representation. Using humor as a tool to diffuse these heavy-handed themes, Études des Gottnarrenmaschinen takes the musical analogy of the ‘étude’ seriously, considering these to be studies, “lessons,” difficult, all aimed towards a future idea of what fiction could be, pushing up against a static Aristotelian scheme.

In this collection the reader moves from a Rome both ancient and modern to a reconfigured world of global travel, and on to a unique, philosophical examination of translation, rationalism and the possibility of the transcendent. Instead of being envious of the video game as the site of literary potential, Anderson has boldly taken on the form in the first piece of this collection, “Failed Proposals,” and what we get as the result is the closest one can come to having a Playstation story that Barthelme or Perec would be happy to sit down and play.

The second work, an extended version of “The Gospels of Movement,” which first appeared online, in its depiction of St. Patrick as the Slack Dog Snake Driver explores modern forms of travel and the potential for violence, searching and debunking the myth of Ireland’s patron saint, but also in an Andersonian way, reasserting it.

The final work in this collection is the “Cartesian Diver,” an extraordinary undertaking that explodes the idea of what words can and cannot achieve in the world of objects. This piece takes up Descartes and his Meditations on First Philosophy and as French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux has recently suggested, Cartesian rationalism is not as easy to do away with as modern philosophers would have us believe and as such, Anderson takes another, necessary stab at Descartes and leads us to surprising ground, giving way, in the end, to the Cartesian Evil Deceiver: a blueprint for what a speculative realist fiction could read like. In each of these pieces form is used with special care, finding the best tool to explore each of its powerful ideas.