Invention of Monsters / Plays for the Theatre

C Dylan Bassett's books are Gad's Book (2023), A Failed Performance: Short Plays & Scenes by Daniil Kharms (2018), and Invention of Monsters: Plays for the Theatre (2015). He is an Assistant Professor of English at Xavier University in Cincinnati.

These are ravishing performance texts—concise prose poems that invite active interpretation. How are they to be brought to the stage—as monologues, as dialogues, as stage directions indicating a mise-en-scéne—or as a combination thereof? Alternately playful, sexual, and moralistic in the best sense of the word, these plays deserve an audience. — David Greenspan, author of The Myopia and Other PlaysCunningly exploiting the prose poem's genre problem to explore the gender problem, C Dylan Bassett's moving sequence examines icons and clichés of male identity with a bemused, rueful, tender, estranged eye. In frequently gorgeous and often uncanny 'scenes,' restlessly paratactic sentences coexist in isolation, echoing the structural loneliness of gender construction. These songs of experience still remember innocence, but know sex cannot help us avoid the masks culture insists on imposing on our faces, 'mirrors' in which 'other faces come and go.' — Donna Stonecipher, author of Model CityUsing the simple machine of the sentence, C Dylan Bassett builds an intricate and hypnotic mise-en-abîme. The Invention of Monsters surveils the world's impulse to police itself with a re-sequenced form of seeing. The moving parts of each prose diorama refuse the logic of prefabricated projection. This book is best viewed through a compound eye. — Eric Baus, author of The Tranquilized Tongue