After the Water Receded

Bradford's new literary collection includes stories and tales, surreal vignettes, epistolary exchanges, and dream reports. His experiments in historical fiction are stunning feats of imaginative transposal focused on a seventh-century ascetic and the modern artists Paul Klee, Piet Mondrian, and Marcel Duchamp. Bradford's prose is precise, charged, highly metaphoric, at times breath-stealing in its beauty, and versatile enough to capture the ruminations of a serial killer, the inelegant speech of a ranch hand describing his experience of being struck by lightning, and the telegraphic communications of the poet Paul Valery's character Monsieur Teste. Bradford's essay on artistic creativity doubles as a memoir, and the works themselves are fascinating--imagine material artwork that avoids all means of adhesion. The preface mentions his book's main themes: death and the scenes that surround it; spiritual intent and mystical experience; artistic creativity and the production of artwork; and the trials of inhabiting a physical body. An obvious fifth theme is our dystopian future. In the style he calls visionary prose, Bradford describes just such a dark future.