I am saddened by the news of the death of John Domini, superb writer, exemplary literary citizen, small press hero, Big Other contributor, and great friend.

Here are some highlights from our fifteen-year-plus friendship:

Here’s the introduction I delivered before John’s reading at Brown University on March 21, 2013:

Don DeLillo once characterized his work as a series of reflections about “men in small rooms.” Like those desperate men, vacillating between doubt and action, navigating between the elusive and the allusive, the characters in Domini’s Bedlam also find themselves in these selfsame rooms, like the cold anonymity of motel rooms found in “Over 4000 Square Miles,” a fiction positing representation as transgression, where a battle-fatigued soldier, fueled on cannabis and no small amount of hubris, if not outright fear, visits an in-progress reenactment-for-television of his famed escape from the enemy, and ends up entering the Everglades, intending to wrestle an alligator. There is also the “silent and empty kitchen” of “The Return,” a liminal space, where a recently murdered couple visit a surly former-stockbroker. Yes, the so-called barriers between so-called reality and so-called fantasy in this collection are porous. “Laugh Kookaberry, Laugh Kookaberry,” for instance, features a garrulous demon reflecting on twisted intimacies, and so Bedlam might as well have been called Pandæmonium, referring back to the name of the palace built in the middle of John Milton’s vision of Hell, viz., the “high capital of Satan and all his peers,” in Paradise Lost. “Special Instructions, Special Instructions” finds another man in a small room, this one an office, rejecting the ladder climb. He states: “Why should I weasel around after my own office, and then a larger office, and then another that’s still larger? After a certain point’s reached, they’re only rooms,” believing it more important to “know who you are and exist accordingly.” In “Thirty Spot, Fifteen Back on Either Side,” we find another business man, reflecting on a certain salacious episode in another small room, then thinking the following: “he’d wanted to come by means of this experience to a more complete, more substantial idea of himself as an individual. Grissom alone, he’d wanted to see. Grissom as a separately defined person, as an intensely, separately defined person, something as unique and identifiable as a planet in a pale sky.” Domini’s Bedlam, with its ruined men, whether succumbing to PTSD-induced delusions or to their long-arrested imaginations, forced me, after reading it, to temporarily have difficulty distinguishing “suits” from ghosts and other spectralities.

Here’s what I had to say about John’s The Sea-God’s Herb after I read it in 2014:

Discerning readers know there’s a dearth of astute literary criticism out there, so John Domini‘s The Sea-God’s Herb, a career-spanning collection of insightful reviews and essays published about a week ago, is especially welcome. There you’ll find Domini dynamically engaging many great writers, including many favorites of mine: John Barth, Matt Bell, Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, Guy Davenport, Don DeLillo, Brian Evenson, William Gass, Jaimy Gordon, John Hawkes, Carole Maso, Lance Olsen, Richard Powers, Thomas Pynchon, Dawn Raffel, Ishmael Reed, W. G. Sebald, and Gilbert Sorrentino. It’s no mistake that The Sea-God’s Herb is 360-pages, since it’s a critical encircling of critical texts.

In 2016, I reviewed John’s Movieola! for the Brooklyn Rail. Read the review here. But here’s an excerpt:

Movieola! […] is an exploration of the ways in which hyper-privileged consumers navigate their way through life’s uncertainties, whether sitting in front of so-called silver screens, which brings “a bunch of strangers together in the dark,” or, within what you might call the zone of the most enriching solitude: between the pages of a book. In short, Movieola! is a bravura performance by a still largely unsung writer producing his best work.

In 2019, I published John’s “Fish Story, Hoodie Howl,” which is a characteristic example of John’s sharp wit and expansive imagination. Watch John reading it with his wife, Lettie Prell, here!

Happy, too, to have published John’s discussion with Amber Sparks’s about John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor in 2010. Also, be sure to read John Domini’s one-sentence take on a beloved sentence of Barth’s, which I also published in 2010.

And finally, in 2021, I nominated John’s wonderful The Archeology of a Good Ragù: Discovering Naples, My Father, and Myself as a finalist for the 2021 Big Other Book Award for Nonfiction. Watch John read from it here.

R.I.P., amico.