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Essays, Manifestos, Statements, Speeches, Maxims, Epistles, Diaristic Jottings, Narratives, Natural histories, Poems, Plays, Performances, Ramblings, Revelations, and all such ephemera as may appear necessary to bring society into a slight tremolo of confusion and fright at least.

Defoe

Leslie Scalapino

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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 memory.”

The Review of Contemporary Fiction wrote of this book: “As a literary work, Defoe most closely resembles the sort of automatic writing pioneered by Breton and Soupault; as a political and philosophical critique of contemporary discourse, Defoe reveals a deep affinity with the works of Heidegger and Derrida. But ultimately—perhaps most controversially—it is a call to writers to liberate themselves from the limits of narrative and embrace a new kind of writing.”