fictions present
Gaddis Centenary Roundtable – Publishing in the Innovative Tradition: A Conversation

This roundtable discussion, featuring Danielle Dutton, Edwin Frank, and Martin Riker took place at the Gaddis Centenary Conference in St Louis, on October 21st 2022. It has been lightly edited for clarity and was transcribed by Marie Fahd.
“A Long and Uninterrupted Decline”: Accumulation, Empire, and Built Environments in William Gaddis’s The Recognitions

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.
“Honored by the Error”: The Literary Friendship of Gaddis and Gass

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.
Gaddis Centenary Roundtable: “Teaching Gaddis Today”

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.
An Interview with Rick Moody

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).