The Nine Lives of BIG JP: A Metabiography is an unprecedented look into genuine partnership, how it is constituted and how it lasts. An authentic love story, a remarkable rendering of life in America during the twentieth century and beyond. It is a masterwork. "It represents the extraordinary new genre of 'metabiography', which emerged from early twentieth-century modernism, evolved through postmodernism, and is now firmly established in the present. As metabiography, Big JP eschews boundaries by blending biography, memoir, travelogue, art criticism, and fictional narratives into a dynamic and original art form. The story of Judith Palmer unfolds a four-dimensional, kaleidoscopic vison of the sixty-year life story that Judith and Ben have woven together." -Kumiko Hoshi, Professor of English Language and Culture, Aichi Gakuin University; author of D.H. Lawrence and Pre-Einsteinian Modernist Relativity (2018), and Quests for Corvo (2025).
"Ben Stoltzfus calls this book a 'metabiography' but the label shouldn't hide that it invents a new genre, and is above all a prose poem to his artist wife, Judith. It is unique in its experimental deployment of several different modes of writing-memoir, fictional narrative, and picturesque depictions of landscape and seascape. But it is most of all a testament to an all too rare desire to know, understand and collaborate with her as a woman, wife and partner. Stoltzfus attends deeply to Judith's perceptions, states of mind and emotional contours as he unfolds Judith's own remembrances of her youth and younger adulthood, highlighting key moments and psychological breaks and breakthroughs in her life, as his own unforgettable renderings of them become a deeply poetic homage to her. Few people have sought to undertake to grasp the totality of another human being and even fewer have succeeded as fully as Stoltzfus has in this marvelous, gripping book, which demonstrates how the 'impossible' relation between the sexes can nevertheless establish itself to create something greater than the sum of its two parts. An amazing tour de force." -Juliet Flower MacCannell, Professor Emerita, English and Comparative Literature, University of California, Irvine; author of Figuring Lacan (1986/ "Classic" 2014); The Hysteric's Guide to the Future Female Subject (2000).
"Ben Stoltzfus has written perceptively on metafiction. He offers a new informative and enthralling 'metabiography.' Through contextually amplified diaries, recast fiction, allusion, and direct narrative of Judith's and Ben's collaboration, this self-reflexive memoir, cast in multifaceted and resonant art forms, tells an intriguing love story of their encounters, their lives, and devotion to each other." -Roch C. Smith, Professor Emeritus, French, The University of North Carolina, Greensboro; author of Gaston Bachelard (2016); Understanding Robbe-Grillet (2000).
Ben Stoltzfus is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature and Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside. He is a novelist, translator, literary critic and internationally recognized inter-arts scholar. He has published 12 monographs of literary criticism, five novels and one collection of short stories. He has received many awards: Fulbright, Camargo, Gradiva, Humanities, Creative Arts, and MLA. Stoltzfus lives in Riverside, California, with Judith Palmer, his wife.
