This roundtable discussion took place online in August 2023: it has been lightly edited for focus and clarity. The Chair was Ali Chetwynd, with Jeff Bursey, Victoria Harding, Chad Post, Edwin Turner, Chris Via as speakers. More about each participant, including links to their individual projects, can be found in their electronic book review author biographies.

A total solar eclipse occurs when the moon slides between the sun and the Earth, aligned precisely so that the lunar body appears to block the solar surface entirely from view. In this autobiographical essay, Steve Tomasula, an Illinois-based writer known for collaborative image-text assemblages, from TOC to Ascension, that convey how and why humans’ existential sense of reality can vary so radically across time and space, recalls an April 2017 Midwestern road-trip pursuing the path of the total eclipse. In Tomasula’s account of the totality, the multiple meditations surrounding this predictable celestial event only intensify the sublimity of the shared experience and its disruptive systemic effects.

Scott Rettberg, Director of the Center for Digital Narrative (CDN), interviews Flourish Klink, podcaster and fandom expert, about their rich history with fandom and fan culture.

Jon Fain studied creative writing with William Gaddis at Bard College between 1976 and 1978, during Gaddis’s first university teaching job. It didn’t go perfectly, as Fain discusses in this retrospective, which includes a letter of Gaddis’s writing-feedback.

Rochelle Gold brings Gaddis’s early critique of mid-century capitalism into contact with current criticism by Alan Liu and others, who suggest that humanists must bring their own questions, interests, and values to the table, rather than acquiescing to the economic logic of post-industrialism.

Mark Madigan shares a photograph of William Gaddis, captured by John Puleio, during one of his largely improvised lectures.

This roundtable discussion of translating William Gaddis's fiction, with Spanish translator Mariano Peyrou, Portugese translator Francine Osaki, and Ukrainian translator Max Nestelieiev, took place online on September 3rd 2023. Russian translator Sergey Karpov and Japanese translator Yoshihiko Kihara, unable to join on that day, sent written responses to some of the roundtable questions, which have been incorporated below where the relevant question was asked. The transcript has been reviewed, annotated, and lightly edited for clarity and cohesion by roundtable moderator, Marie Fahd.

Lisa Siraganian, the J. R. Herbert Boone Chair in Humanities in the Department of Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins University, applies her expertise in legal theory to Gaddis’s penultimate novel. Following discussions on business law and the controversial notion of corporate personhood, Siraganian reads Gaddis's fourth novel to explore how a business-dominated legal culture transforms our conceptions and narratives of the individual person.

This article discusses the Environmental Audiotour—a work by Parikka, Patelli, and Wong through which art and technology intersect with environmental issues at the Helsinki Biennial 2023. The artist-researchers explore topics like rising sea levels affecting islands, how humans impact the environment, and ways to visualize environmental data. Overall, the authors use creative methods to understand and address environmental problems in today's digital world.

Thank you to the ELO 2023 conference, especially to its organizers, Daniela Maduro, Manuel Portela, Rui Torres, and Alex Saum-Pascual, who first hosted Professor Jussi Parikka as a keynote speaker at their conference in Coimbra, Portugal. This resulting publication is a collaboration with ELO 2023 and will also appear in their forthcoming conference publications.

Written by William Gaddis in the mid-1940s, “Faire Exchange No Robbery” is a short, mock-Elizabethan play in verse, about early poetry anthologies and the death of Christopher Marlowe. Jeffrey Severs brings this unpublished document to light, finding in it the germ of Gaddis’s career-long interests in art’s relationship to commerce, and in the significance of contracts.

Synthesising the published record, Ted Morrissey chronicles and analyzes the relationship between literary Williams Gaddis and Gass, which began in 1976 after Gass had helped secure the National Book Award for Gaddis's J R. Morrissey examines not only the pair's shared social history of meetings, conferences, and letters, but also examines the commonalities in their approaches to literature, and their affinities of taste, habit, and vision.

Moody's interview is a story about how stories get published, the people who publish, and the perils of single-copy print manuscripts moving through FedEx prior to digital tracking, as well as: "a snapshot of the intricacies of culture as a whole". As an insider perspective on how literary influence operates to perpetuate a continuum, this interview contributes to our awareness of how 'maximalist' bravura epic-comic literature emerges from mimesis and adoration to seed lineage canons (Keaton, Beckett, Pynchon, Gaddis, Moody).

Jack Williams, after noting how the "depiction of U.S. imperialism in The Recognitions has received scant critical attention," gathers a selection of concrete descriptions in Gaddis's first novel of the "built environments" in the New York City and Paris sections, then demonstrates how these settings reflect and expand on the novel’s multi-pronged critique of postwar consumer culture.

This roundtable discussion chaired by Ali Chetwynd, featuring artists Stef Aerts, Thomas Verstraeten, David Bird, Edward Holland, and Tim Youd took place at the Gaddis Centenary Conference in St Louis, on October 21st 2022. It has been lightly edited for clarity. Transcript by Marie Fahd.

Chaired by Rone Shavers, transcribed by Marie Fahd, and joined by Jeff Jackson and Jacob Singer, this roundtable and discussion took place at the Gaddis Centenary Conference in St Louis, on October 22nd 2022. It has been lightly edited and expanded.