essays Page 1 of 36

2025

22-Jun-2025
Let’s Build a City: Introducing the Living Glossary of Digital Narrative

Hannah Ackermans introduces The Living Glossary of Digital Narrative via a discussion of digital communities and unintentional acts of exclusion, highlighting the importance of a shared vocabulary for accessibility in scholarship.

02-Mar-2025
María Mencía’s e-Poetry: A Conversation Exploring Her Work

In this conversation with Yolanda De Gregorio Robledo, e-poet María Mencía discusses her journey as an artist and scholar. In doing so, María reveals her artistic interests, the influences the electronic literature community has had on her work, and the importance of highlighting women's contributions to the field of electronic literature as a whole.

09-Feb-2025
Call for contributions for special issue “Celebrating Joseph Tabbi and 30 Years of electronic book review

A special call for papers celebrating the work of Joe Tabbi—electronic book review's founder and long-term editor-in-chief—which will be published in a special issue of electronic book review during the journal's 30th anniversary year.

02-Feb-2025
ebr at the crossroads

The electronic book review Editorial Team discusses electronic book review's 30th anniversary, the journal's position at the junctures of multiple academic disciplines, the threat of an increasingly turbulent global stage, and the aspiration to continue providing a home for a future defined by resistance and unity.

2024

08-Dec-2024
A Personal Twine Story

In a keynote delivered at ELO 2024, Chris Klimas recounts ELO 2007 and the creation of Twine. In doing so, he highlights the importance of community and open-source software in fostering digital creativity, while pondering the possibility of a platform dark forest.

03-Nov-2024
Reading ELIZA: Critical Code Studies in Action

Marino and Berry discuss their engagement in weekly conversations about the nature of "code, of ELIZA, its descendants" and how each of these programs have circulated within our critical code culture, along with other "contemporary conversation agents like Siri and ALEXA and, of course, ChatGPT."

14-Oct-2024
Remembering Robert Coover

Scott Rettberg and Robert Arellano's collection of interviews "with critics, creative writers, students, and friends of Coover" to commemorate the passing of one of the pioneers in electronic literature.

14-Oct-2024
Robert Coover

John Cayley commemorates Robert Coover, a prolific writer and one of the first supporters of digital writing and writing with computation who in the 1990s began teaching courses in hypermedia (with George Landow) at Brown University. This obituary was originally composed for communities associated with Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, within which Coover lived and worked for almost a half century, and where John Cayley is Professor of Literary Arts.

06-Oct-2024
ebr: meeting point for conversations

Managing Editor Anna Nacher recollects the past — and sketches out the future of ebr.

06-Oct-2024
William Gillespie Netprov Interview

Rob Wittig chats with William Gillespie about working with constraints and word plays, all the while emphasizing the netprov’s community building potential (a particularly big ellipsis needed, anyone?)

09-Jun-2024
William Gaddis’s Unpublished Screenplays, Stage-Drama Scripts, Prospectuses for Film & TV, and Poetry: An Archival Guide

A survey of Gaddis’s known and archived unpublished creative work in poetry and drama, from a parodic Elizabethan play and the complete script of Once at Antietam to a full western film screenplay and a year of failed pitches for TV drama. Each entry contains archival location information, historical information, description and analysis of the archived work, and discussion of any connection to the eventually published fiction.

09-Jun-2024
William Gaddis’s Unpublished Stories and Novel-Prototypes: An Archival Guide

A survey of Gaddis’s known and archived unpublished prose fiction, particularly short stories from before The Recognitions and incomplete forerunner projects for his eventually published novels. Those include the two aborted novels that evolved into The Recognitions, notes toward a projected novel about filmmaking that provided foundational material for Carpenter’s Gothic and A Frolic of His Own, and more. Each entry contains archival location information, historical information, description and analysis of the archived work, and discussion of any connection to the eventually published fiction.

05-May-2024
Juvenilia in the William Gaddis Papers

Kate Michelson Goldkamp surveys the Juvenilia preserved in Gaddis’s archive, finding, among other things, early prefigurations of his “delight[] in the macabre” in some illustrated mini-stories, hints of the boy JR's worldview in studies of US geography, and doodles that prefigure some of the published fiction’s hand-drawn illustrations.

05-May-2024
Originality, Authenticity, Translation, Forgery: Why Translators and Translation Theorists Should Read The Recognitions

Translator Francine Ozaki reads The Recognitions through the overarching debates of twentieth-century translation theory, finding the conflict between Wyatt’s and Otto’s handling of Forgery, Originality, and Authenticity illuminating the concerns of today's professional translators. Questions of credit, treachery, allegiance, payment, and dependency are so fully addressed in the novel that translators and translation theorists should be reading it to help make sense of their own artistic and professional roles.

05-May-2024
REFLECTIONS ON & APPRECIATION OF A PILE FABRIC PRIMER

Scott Zieher offers some creative non-fiction in praise of perhaps Gaddis’s least-lauded publication: the lavishly illustrated and sample-provisioned “masterwork of printed ephemera” A Pile Fabric Primer. How did this mysterious document come to be, and what does it tell us about the creative writer's working conditions?

05-May-2024
William Gaddis as Philosopher: Kierkegaard, Style, and the Spirit of Hegel

Cole Fishman argues that Gaddis should be recognized for his contributions to philosophy, no matter what the "disciplinary gatekeepers" think.

07-Apr-2024
A Student With Mr. Gaddis

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.

07-Apr-2024
Gaddis Centenary Roundtable: Translating Gaddis

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.

07-Apr-2024
Gaddis Centenary Roundtable: Para-Academic Venues for Discussing Gaddis and Other Innovative Fiction

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.

07-Apr-2024
The Most Curious Career: William Gaddis in Germany

A personal recitation of Paul Ingendaay's career as a "lifelong" associate editor with the Frankfurter Allgemeine. Ingendaay also shares with us a recollection of the slow, belated but definitive situation of Gaddis's lifework in the German literary canon.