Prose. A boy finds an artist's manifesto on the floor, a gay man reflects on his regrets, a woman suddenly sees a man's face through her car window. Subtly referencing some of the great iconoclasts of literature and philosophy (Kafka, Wilde, Nietzsche), the vignettes in THE BIG LIE unveil a defiant sense of contemporary artistic possibility, rising at times into a full-scale attack on American style consumerism, unmediated authorship, and the bloated privileges of literary genius. Quick shifts between styles, personas, and subject matter keep the reader critical and wary. Wallace's SONNETS OF A PENNY-A-LINER, NOTHING HAPPENED AND BESIDES I WASN'T THERE, and COMPLICATIONS FROM STANDING IN A CIRCLE are also available from SPD.

About the author: Mark Wallace's most recent book is Felonies of Illusion, just out from Edge Books. His most recent book of fiction is Walking Dreams: Selected Early Tales. Wallace has authored more than ten books and chapbooks of poetry, including Nothing Happened and Besides I Wasn't There and Sonnets of a Penny-A-Liner. Temporary Worker Rides A Subway won the 2002 Gertrude Stein Poetry Award and was published by Green Integer Books. His multi-genre work Haze (Edge Books) was published in 2004, and his first collection of fiction, The Big Lie, was published by Avec Books in Fall 2000. His critical articles and reviews have appeared in numerous publications. Along with Steven Marks, he edited Telling It Slant: Avant Garde Poetics of the 1990s (University of Alabama Press) a collection of 26 essays by different writers on the subject of contemporary avant garde poetry and poetics. Wallace teaches literature and creative writing at Cal State San Marcos.