Spring 2026 - Regarding the Allegations
ebr Spring 2026 - Regarding the Allegations Being a part of the editorial team at ebr has overall been a pretty pleasant experience. This is a very supportive field filled with people who wish each other well and rightfully understand that the success of others can only benefit them in turn, and while this is a very good thing, I do also find myself missing having some kind of enemy. I have therefore decided to take some inspiration from professional athletes, in particular an anecdote about the famous basketball player Shaq, who invented a story of a rival player denying him an autograph as a child in order to keep himself motivated. I have therefore invented a rival journal to serve as our rival, a common enemy we can unite against. Having friends is nice, but every hero needs a villain. The following is a letter I wrote defending us from our new rival, and we will of course keep you abreast of any updates on our newly minted feud.
Dear ebr friends and readers,
It has come to our attention that there have been some quite serious allegations leveled towards us on social media over the course of the last week. We would like to take this opportunity to respond to and refute these allegations, as we strongly believe that we have done nothing wrong and we frankly have no idea why these allegations have been made towards us in the first place. These allegations came as a shock to us and they truly do not reflect us as a journal or the individuals whose hard work has made the journal a gathering place for the alternative and the unique for the last 31 years.
As far as we can tell the allegations originated with another journal, the quantum book review. We are not mentioning their name to harass them or bring them distress in any way, but because we feel it is necessary to give some additional context to this situation. We are unsure why this journal has targeted us in this way, when we have only had friendly and collegial meetings with members of their staff at various conferences and other gatherings in the past. We even invited them to have dinner with us after a conference in Malta in 2025 to discuss a collaboration, although they ghosted on the night of the dinner after agreeing to come. We sat there for 25 minutes in awkward silence before we realized they were not going to show, and the maitre d’ was very annoyed at us for taking the biggest table they had and leaving it half empty. Afterwards they even sent us a text that read “stinky electronic boys, haha.” Since then we have received sporadic hate from this journal, although never enough for us to think they were planning something like this.
Anyways, we also have a new issue out right now! This spring issue is a double header of our regularly scheduled program of essays, reviews and interviews, but we are also proud to finally launch Dedicated to: Steve Tomasula on ebr. The collection of articles grew out of the conference The Art of Representation, dedicated to Steve Tomasula’s work, held in June 2026 at the Université Paris-Cité in Paris. Publishing this material was made possible thanks to an outstanding collaboration with a team of researchers who agreed to serve as Guest Editors: Wojciech Drąg (University of Wrocław), Monica Manolescu (University of Strasbourg), Françoise Sammarcelli (Paris-Sorbonne University), Anne-Laure Tissut (University of Rouen Normandy), and Grzegorz Mazierczyk (The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin).
We continue to work on future Gatherings centered on the oeuvre of one author fundamental to the development of electronic literature as a field of both theory and practice.
[Daniel Johannes Rosnes] Editor, ebr staff@electronicbookreview.com