A survey of Gaddis’s known and archived unpublished creative work in poetry and drama, from a parodic Elizabethan play and the complete script of Once at Antietam to a full western film screenplay and a year of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.

A survey of Gaddis’s known and archived unpublished prose fiction, particularly short stories from before The Recognitions and incomplete forerunner projects for his eventually published novels.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.

With this brief look at Large Language Model surrealism, Nick Montfort locates and identifies "the id of the internet, of publishing, of podcasting."

Hypertext pioneer Robert Arellano discusses the genre with Scott Rettberg, Director of the Center for Digital Narrative (CDN).

Elliot Yates examines Gaddis’s first corporate writing assignment, with the company Textron, which seems to coincide directly with his first conception of the plot for J R. Textron was one of the first US corporations to explicitly pursue conglomerate “diversification” through buying up seemingly unrelated businesses, and Yates shows how this not only helped generate the plot of J R, but functions as a key to understanding its formal design.

Further memories from yet another student of William Gaddis during the time when WG taught at Bard.

David Ting excavates the archived compositional history of Agapē Agape to test what we can learn from the marginal annotations in Gaddis’s working library, focusing on his copy of Susan Stebbing’s Philosophy and the Physicists. Ting finds Gaddis testing his own ideas against those of Stebbing and her sources, while making outward connections between this technical material and his literary reading in Plato and Faust. Illuminating the novel’s chronological evolution, Ting also provides us a case study in tracking how authors use their reading as a “means of invention.”

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.

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.

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?

After noting how J R was a reflection of postmodern society and antiheroic traditions in America in the 1970s, Lalita Kashoba Mohan signals a similar postmodern turn in her homeland, India, and other countries "whose economic development is now following America’s earlier path."

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.