When it’s fiction as extreme sport

Benjamin WEISSMAN is just your typical L.A. fiction-writing, ski-bumming, art-critiquing, canvas-painting hyphenate. Which is to say, he is an aberration.

“Headless,” his just-published short-story collection, is something of a literary anomaly as well, a playful melange of erotic black comedy and domestic pathos, dysfunctional families and all-too-functional men, dictators and lumberjacks. Weissman is an expert juggler of tone; “Headless” has its share of graphic grotesquerie, but its more affecting stories sneak up on you without warning. The work, like the man, is a moving target.

“I never studied writing in school, which is probably why my stuff reads the way it does,” says Weissman, 46, who is tucking into a late afternoon lunch at Fred 62 in Los Feliz, a short car ride from his Echo Park home. “It’s sort of like my paintings, which tend to blur realism and abstraction.”

Weissman’s work finds shelter under the large umbrella of transgressive fiction, that amorphous category reserved for writers like Aimee Bender, Nicholson Baker and Mary Gaitskill, who willfully tilt away from mainstream prose or storytelling. Like them, Weissman’s an eccentric stylist who writes compact and mordantly humorous set pieces.

The opening salvo of “Headless,” “Hitler Ski Story,” imagines Der Fuhrer as a hopeless bunny sloper, “a bundle of conflicting limbs and joints all colliding at the groin.” The one-paragraph story “Wicked Maid Churning Butter” is told from the point of view of a man who has turned himself into a bear: “What was once financially out of my reach at the supermarket would now be a claw’s grab away.” This might also be the only book of fiction published this year in which winter sports are a major leitmotif, a nod to Weissman’s lifelong passion for skiing.

“It’s hard to write a book that is interesting stylistically and is so hilarious, as well,” says author Dennis Cooper (“Closer,” “Frisk”), who shepherded “Headless” into print. It was published last month as part of a series of alternative fiction titles put out by Akashic Books but handpicked and edited by Cooper. “His work almost has the benevolence of a Mel Brooks film. He takes delight in the unusual or the gross, but he’s not out to shock. There’s a real depth and sadness in the work.”

In its review of “Headless,” Publisher’s Weekly singled out Weissman’s “zesty, original use of language and his unflinching approach to describing human truths, especially the awkward, bizarre or undesirable ones.” Is it really any wonder that Weissman’s literary hero is Donald Barthelme, the high priest of contemporary experimental fiction? Like the late Barthelme, whose carefully calibrated, wildly inventive stories mapped out a psychically fragmented universe, Weissman mucks around in the id and digs up some startling imagery.

“Barthelme brought me to the form,” says Weissman. “I had never really read a book prior to reading him, and I was shocked by what he was doing. I loved it, and I wanted to do my version of it.”

Weissman, whose ever-present porkpie hat gives him a jazzman’s mien, is a native of Culver City. His father handled public relations for Universal and CBS, and his mother was a stage actress. Weissman was an indifferent student, a surf bum who committed to higher education only to keep himself from “dropping off the face of the Earth.” After graduating from North Hollywood High School, Weissman attended CalArts, where he immersed himself in drawing, painting and sculpture and also began to write.

“To me, writing was an inexpensive medium and a pure form,” says Weissman. “This was in the heyday of conceptual art, which I felt was pulling the wool over people’s eyes. You could put Barthelme -- who I thought was doing the same thing with writing -- up against any of those [visual] artists, and he was far superior. And you could buy one of his books for $5.”

Weissman began to find success with his own artwork, which has been exhibited around the world, and he became an art critic. He is still a frequent contributor to Artforum and Frieze magazines.

But it was Beyond Baroque, the nonprofit literary center in Venice that has nurtured countless writers and poets, that provided Weissman the impetus to consider fiction as a vocation. As a 21-year-old aspirant, Weissman read some early work at an open reading and caught the attention of Cooper. Now, 25 years later, they find themselves working together; tonight’s joint reading at Book Soup is part of a cross-country reading tour.

“Dennis was really generous with me,” he says. “He hooked me up with Edmund White for a reading, and I was all excited! I met some of my closest friends at Beyond Baroque. Everything about that place was informative.”

Weissman found work at Beyond Baroque organizing the reading series, and he even met his wife, award-winning poet Amy Gerstler, at the center. “She was the cute librarian,” he says.

Weissman’s first short-story collection, “Dear Dead Person,” was published in 1995. Then last year, he got a phone call from Cooper. “He asked me if I had a manuscript, and I had about 40 stories,” says Weissman. “He shrunk it down to 22 and organized them into an order that made sense. He’s a really great editor.”

Weissman is writing his first novel when he isn’t teaching at Otis College of Art and Design or Art Center College of Design. And he’s getting in as much skiing as possible. His wife, however, won’t be joining him on the steep black diamond runs. “She hates snow, cold and speed. I just keep a log going on the fire in the cabin, and she reads.”

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Reading

Who: Benjamin Weissman

The book: “Headless,” Akashic Books, $12.95

Where: Book Soup, 8818 W. Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood

When: Tonight, 7 p.m.

Cost: Free

Contact: (310) 659-3110

Also: Writers Dennis Cooper and Aimee Bender also will participate in the reading and discussion.