fictions present
Digital Orihon (デジタル折り本): The (un)continuous shape of the novel.
Wright explores the digital manifestation of an orihon manuscript style for how it can expand how we think of the novel's form. He considers how digital versions of J.M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year and his own print novella make use of the concept of the fold as identified in the orihon style.
In Conversation with Bertrand Gervais at the Heart of the Digital World
Dani Spinosa asks Bertrand Gervais about the place of digital literatures across Francophone and Anglophone Canada, the issue of genre and labelling in the field, and his work with NT2. Gervais here foregrounds the ground-breaking contributions of Québécois writers, artists, and scholars that are foundational to Canadian digital humanities and media studies across the country, and speaks to how important it is that digital publishing prioritize accessibility and evolution.
Introduction: Decoding Canadian Digital Poetics
Dani Spinosa and Lai-Tze Fan discuss the need for a Canadian digital poetics, as well as for an understanding of its past developments, present shifts, and future possibilities.
Delirium, Disruption and Death: On Stéphane Vanderhaeghe’s Charøgnards (Quidam éditeur, 2015).
Whilst reading Stéphane Vanderhaeghe’s dystopian fiction and touching on Bernard Stiegler's Age of Disruption, Greg Hainge explores the world that now reads us via a universal digitisation.
Genre Defining: Michael Lackey’s Conversations with Biographical Novelists
After a programmatic attempt to taxonomize the genre of biographical fiction, Lackey's actual interviews with the genre's representative authors tend to uphold the willfully untamable nature of fiction.
Image by Joanna Portelli
Our Struggle: Reading Karl Ove Knausgård’s Min Kamp
A roundtable discussion hosted by Karl Knausgaard's Alma Mater in Bergen, Norway.
Taxonomographic Metafiction: A review of Anthony Uhlmann’s Saint Antony in His Desert
For Martin Eve, Anthony Uhlmann appears to be writing for a very small audience: "those who are interested in contemporary mutations in metafiction, autofiction, and post-postmodern sensibilities."
Decollage of an Iconic Image
Even as the first biography of Kathy Acker appears, we have word of a newly assembled Acker archive in Cologne, under the curatorship of Daniel Schulz. The gist of which, could be to re-orient Acker's personal relationships to "the politics inherent in Acker's life."
Of Myth and Madness: A Postmodern Fable
Ralph Clare reviews After Kathy Acker: A Literary Biography by Chris Kraus.
Review of Making Literature Now by Amy Hungerford
Berry, who with ebr editor Joseph Tabbi initiated the Fictions Present thread (circa 2006), finds few intersections of that project with Hungerford’s celebrated Making Literature Now, not least because Hungerford shows little interest in the question of how her titular concept, when applied to commercial and cultural productions, indie and alt endeavors, “manages to mean what those trying to make literature are trying to make.”