postmodern fiction

Steve Tomasula in Conversation with Jhave. Recorded at the Banff Centre, Alberta, Canada. 2012-02-21.

House of Leaves may be on everyone's shortlist of postmodern media-savvy novels, but are we ready for a retrospective collection of essays on Mark Z. Danielewski? According to Daniel Punday's review, Joe Bray and Alison Gibbons' collection says as much about the current state of (post) postmodernist writing as it does about Danielewski's scant oeuvre.

On the occasion of a new novel by Joseph McElroy and the Overlook Press reissue of McElroy's earlier work, Andrew Walser initiates a revaluation.

Michael Wutz writes of how, in Raymond Federman's My Body in Nine Parts, body parts are represented as having registered, inscribed, contributed to Federman's life.

Eric Dean Rasmussen explores Lynne Tillman's "cognitive aesthetic," suggesting that her work is powered by the generative disconnect between asignifying affect and signifying emotion. He argues that her 1998 novel, No Lease on Life, examines the role of affectively sustained universal values in responding politically to the neoliberal city.

Two innovative contemporary writers discuss the relationship between encyclopedic narrative and notions of gender and writing, the body as the physical embodiment of memory, and the unique syntax of Tillman's American Genius, A Comedy. The novel's prose depicts the way "thought, when you're not thinking, happens."