postmodernism

AVA is an attempt, in the words of French feminist philosopher Helene Cixous, “to come up with a language that heals as much as it separates.” The fragments of the novel are combined to make a new kind of wholeness, allowing environments, states of mind, and rhythms not ordinarily associated with fiction to emerge. AVA‘s theme is the poignancy of mortality, the extraordinary desire to live, the inevitability of death—the things never done, never understood, the things never said, or said right, or said enough. Ava yearns and the reader yearns with her, struggling to hold on to all that slips away.

(Source: http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/product/ava/)

If David Markson is anything like Writer, a lugubrious fellow who pops up intermittently in ''This Is Not a Novel,'' his latest experimental outing, he seems to have written a book that's entertaining in spite of himself. Writer mopes around, feeling ''weary unto death of making up stories'' and ''equally tired of inventing characters.'' In an apparent bid to make his readers just as miserable, he wishes to ''contrive'' a ''novel'' without either. 

By: Laura Miller

(Source: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/01/04/01/bib/010401.r…)

Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988) is Markson’s most critically acclaimed and well-known novel. Taking the style of Springer’s Progress even further, this novel is made of the one or two sentence paragraph thoughts of Kate (whose name also appears later in Reader’s Block), a painter who is, or believes herself to be, the last woman (or man, or animal) on earth. Amongst recollections of her travels (in search of any other people) and her life in a beach house, Kate struggles with the concept of language and how it can adequately represent our thoughts. The novel is brimming with references to art historical figures (more about the artists themselves, than their work), Greek drama, philosophers, writers, and the connections between (some real, some made up by the narrator), as Kate recalls things she has read or learned, sometimes inaccurately (though she does not always realize this). Throughout, an element of despair and loneliness pervades the text. Wittgenstein’s Mistress is a novel unlike any other, vast in its erudition and touching in its sadness.

(Source: https://madinkbeard.com/archives/david-markson-an-introduction)

"Sentence" is an entire 2,000 word story told in the form of one sentence.

It was first published in the Jan. 18, 1969 issue of The New Yorker and subsequently in the collection City Life.