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Reading contemporary American fiction, one may assume that great innovators such as Donald Barthelme, Laura Riding, and Gertrude Stein, among others, have made a negligible impact on the form, which [...]

Not a just image, just an image.--Jean-Luc Godard Already with its puzzling title, Gilbert Sorrentino's Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things poses the question of the relations between two categories of [...]

I once imagined that I could attend a conference of the Associated Writing Programs without putting my writerly soul in jeopardy. I learned otherwise one brilliant Easter weekend in San [...]

A few years ago I wrote a series of essays in which I proclaimed that the enterprise of fiction was in a state of serious crisis - a state that [...]

My father was a machinist. Most of the fathers (and none of the mothers) who lived on our block were workers in heavy steel - a thing, as Plato would [...]

We convened, late summer, between the wars. My friends and I traveled by ferry and train, slept sitting chins on chests, to join the others at Como in the lake [...]

The academy as nursing home for terminally ill arts: better that the novel die with honor in the gutter than enter those gates, where candy-striped theorists will offer it the [...]

As to fiction's future (for which I have no crystal ball), I can only say that I have no fear for it; it looks very bright indeed, although the brightness [...]

We met Robert Creeley at Miriam and Toby Olson's. Michael Heller and Bobby Byrd were there too. Creeley walked Bobby Byrd to our place at three A.M. or so. We [...]

DOES RECENT FLEMISH literary prose tend to be 'postmodern' and its Dutch counterpart more 'classical'? The first part of this introduction covers Dutch literature and the second part covers Flemish [...]

Robert Steiner belongs to his age, a troubled period that has witnessed the demise of all those consecrated categories that formerly enabled us to grasp literary and artistic phenomena. Dubious [...]

The essential details of Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard's formative years are unforgettably recorded in his autobiographical work Gathering Evidence, which is written in the same iconoclastic, relentlessly repetitive style of [...]

James Kelman is among the best known and most celebrated Scottish writers of the post-World War II era, a short-story writer, playwright, and prize-winning novelist whose work is most often [...]

This is not really an essay about Brad Morrow or his projected trilogy so much as it is a reflection on the nature of linked works of fiction as inspired--and [...]

Prologue Do not read this essay. Chapter I: Once upon a before time Once upon a before time, all of duration and space, all of the energy and matter that [...]

A foreword, an afterword? What's the occasion? A collection got up by an editor--on theater, on scribblers' sleepless nights, on the imprint, or residue, of the Bible in a writer's [...]

It begins like a rocket launch, with a thrust of energy, a delirious unleashed syntactical arc that fuses the whooping energy of three boys joyriding in a stolen car with [...]

They spoke in light, when they felt like speaking. They spoke only to her, they said. When she asked them what they wanted, they retreated into the bark of their [...]

'And where there is laughing and gaiety, thinking cannot be worth anything:'--so speaks the prejudice of this serious animal against all Joyful Wisdom--Well, then! Let us show that it is [...]

I think of Curtis White as the model of the child-of-the-sixties as writer. Born in 1951 and raised in San Lorenzo, California, in a postwar, prefabricated housing development, White came [...]

Our cumulative failure to understand and claim our opportunities is the large part of our poverty. --The Idea of Home In the title story of Metaphysics in the Midwest the [...]

1. David Lynch I cherish a particularly eerie moment in David Lynch's Eraserhead when a radiator metamorphoses into a miniature theater and an excessively sentimentalized Thumbelina performs in the void. [...]