"You have never read anything like Martina Flawd. The question is: can you take it?"
Plot Summary

A young sorcerer attends a reunion of his boarding school class to return a surprising power object to his beloved woman with a supreme knack for lucid dreaming.

"For one thing, most contemporary literary fiction is terrible: mannered, conservative and obvious."

Contemporary literary fiction is a lucrative niche making select writers and publishers rich and famous, but it is hard to disagree that topping the New York Times best seller list is no guarantee of real literary merit. Is it still possible to create a novel that will outlive the transient success of an accidental bestseller and become part of 21^st century's cultural heritage? A modern writer Danil Rudoy attempts a positive answer with his Martina Flawd.Martina Flawd and Contemporary Literature

It is hard to place Martina Flawd within contemporary fiction. The novel is structured as a five-act play and utilizes a variety of prose genres ranging from supernaturalism to erotica, but even the obsessive love which seems to drive the plot is only a ruse. The narrator takes his readers for conscious participants of the story and facilities a reexamination of their most intimate convictions. The heroine exhibits every trait of a spoiled aristocratic femme fatale, but her depravity is exonerated despite her best intentions. The last chapter is a flamboyant display of magic, literal and literary, that is inevitable but shocking still.

In the predictable, formulaic world of contemporary literature Martina Flawd is an experiment that may be too bold for the unprepared reader, and not because of its surprisingly explicit sex scenes. The novel challenges the modern zeitgeist itself, with its proclivity to worship love at the expense of best interest. As such, Martina Flawd is a gauntlet thrown in the face of the self-congratulatory, but it may take the rest of the century for the book's assets to become available to those who need them.

"Literary fiction is not a genre: it is literature itself. When you start writing you may not even know whether you'll end up with a novel or a play, or if it'll be a tragedy or a farce. You simply make yourself available to the muse, and She takes you wherever She wants to go."

"Contemporary fiction writers who are not asking themselves how their prose compares to works of classic authors willingly bar themselves from Infinity."

"On amazon's list of best sellers in Contemporary Literature & Fiction, there are titles with muscular men displaying various degrees of nudity on the covers. How did they infiltrate a category that should host the best literature of the 21^st century? This sloppiness is another reason why modern fiction is inferior to its predecessors."

"Writing as a job can never compare to writing as a divine act whose success is measured only by the accuracy with which a unique, idiosyncratic vision found an effective voice and was conveyed in the most suitable narrative."

"Would you rather write a bestseller that'll instantly sell a million copies and be forgotten by the year's end, or a book that will sell a thousand copies a year for the next thousand years? The immediate gain is always tempting, and future blurs as it gets more distant, but the mercenary shortsightedness of the contemporary world is part of the survival of the fittest."

• Contemporary Literature
• Literary Fiction
• Moderm Novel