fictions present

2019

02-Jun-2019
UpSift: on Johanna Drucker's DownDrift

A book-review meditation-musing by David (Jhave) Johnston on a multimodal science fiction by Johanna Drucker. The story is told from the point of view of a distributed organism, Archaea that was discovered in the 1970s. "Structurally similar to bacteria but chemically-distinct," this entity suggests what a born-digital literature for the posthuman era might look like: "an epoch when human-level consciousness drifts down into animals, insects, fish" and many other others.

07-Apr-2019
Our Struggle: Reading Karl Ove Knausgård's Min Kamp

A roundtable discussion hosted by Karl Knausgaard's Alma Mater in Bergen, Norway.

07-Apr-2019
Taxonomographic Metafiction: A review of Anthony Uhlmann's Saint Antony in His Desert

For Martin Eve, Anthony Uhlmann appears to be writing for a very small audience: "those who are interested in contemporary mutations in metafiction, autofiction, and post-postmodern sensibilities."

2018

30-May-2018
Decollage of an Iconic Image

Even as the first biography of Kathy Acker appears, we have word of a newly assembled Acker archive in Cologne, under the curatorship of Daniel Schulz. The gist of which, could be to re-orient Acker's personal relationships to "the politics inherent in Acker's life."

05-May-2018
Of Myth and Madness: A Postmodern Fable

Ralph Clare reviews After Kathy Acker: A Literary Biography by Chris Kraus.

03-Mar-2018
Review of Making Literature Now by Amy Hungerford

Berry, who with ebr editor Joseph Tabbi initiated the Fictions Present thread (circa 2006), finds few intersections of that project with Hungerford’s celebrated Making Literature Now, not least because Hungerford shows little interest in the question of how her titular concept, when applied to commercial and cultural productions, indie and alt endeavors, “manages to mean what those trying to make literature are trying to make.”

2017

04-Dec-2017
"Bad Disruption"

ebr Associate Editor Lai-Tze FAN responds to Dani Spinosa's review of *llegal Literature: Toward a Disruptive Creativity,*by David S. Roh.

03-Dec-2017
Illegal Literature: Toward a Disruptive Creativity

Dani Spinosa reviews David S. Roh's Illegal Literature a book about authorship, copyright, fair use and literary disruptions.

02-Jul-2017
Review of Stewart O'Nan's West of Sunset

In this review of O'Nan's West of Sunset, Messenger explores 20th Century American literary history as a kind of contemporary metafictional myth. Using Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald as characters composing the life of a literary icon against the emergence of "Hollywood," O'Nan's work is considered a bittersweet meditation on the death of an author and the hope that his work lives on.

05-Feb-2017
The New, New, New Philology

In this review of Rethinking the New Medievalism, Matt Cohen ponders the significance of philology's ongoing period of "reflection, [...] refraction, and revisitation." Against the backdrop of contemporary shifts in the humanities, more generally, Cohen sees opportunities for medievalists to intervene, bringing with them both clarity and innovation to fields in a state of fluctuation.

2016

06-Nov-2016
An Aesthetics of the Unsaid

Andrew Lindquist reviews Michael LeMahieu's Fictions of Fact and Value, examining the influence of logical positivism on American literature of the postwar era.

05-Jun-2016
“Persist in Folly”: Review of Mark Greif, The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933-1973.

Afterthoughts on the end of the sixties, the death of the author, the rise of Theory and the fall of humanism.

06-Mar-2016
Recounting Signatures: A Review of James McFarland’s Constellation

In reviewing James McFarland’s Constellation, Donald Cross reminds readers of the rich potential of scholarly discourse. Beyond mere citations and their absence, Cross traces across the bright stars of Nietzsche and Benjamin (and Derrida) relationships worthy of serious consideration. In an age of copy/paste citations, impact reports, and optimized academics, pondering the constellations offers an opportunity to rediscover the subtle intensity of tracing forms in the void.

06-Mar-2016
The Primacy of the Object

In his review of Martin Paul Eve’s Pynchon and Philosophy: Wittgenstein, Foucault and Adorno, Julius Greve situates this new book on Pynchon within the upheavals produced by speculative realism and contemporary discourses on materialism. In doing so, Greve reminds us of what was always already the case: the literary-philosophical relevance of Pynchon, which turns out to be all the more inescapable in contemporary political climates.

07-Feb-2016
The Last Novel

Originally publication: The Schofield, Issue 1.1 - David Markson & Solitude - Summer 2015 (page 13). Reprinted with permission.

03-Jan-2016
Digital Revision

In this analytical, unabashedly philosophical engagement with Alex Galloway's "sneakily-titled" Laruelle Against the Digital, Martin Eve sides with the skeptics for whom "Laruelle proves a better diagnostician of epistemic illness than he is prescriber of a cure."

2015

06-Dec-2015
Love Will Tear Us Apart, Again: Tupitsyn Art Review

McKenzie Wark explores the work of Masha Tupitsyn as a pathway into the conditions of life in the 21st Century, somewhere above (or below) the framework of mediated experience, even beyond the limits of what we often call "theory." With Tupitsyn, Wark troubles the current stasis of representation that stultifies thought in this age of unrepentantly industrialized culture, not by turning us away from the spectacle, but by smashing right through it, picking up its pieces, and discovering new things in the wreckage.

03-May-2015
An Interview with Steve Tomasula

Steve Tomasula discusses the development and context of his work (and TOC in particular), including relations to print and electronic literature, in this interview with Kiki Benzon.

03-May-2015
A World in Numbers: A Review of Michael Joyce, Going the Distance

Joyce’s treatment of baseball in Going the Distance isn’t merely thematic, according to Punday, who believes that baseball (and its emphasis on numerical ordering) here represents the balance of the poetic and computational that defines Joyce’s electronic literature.

03-May-2015
The Importance of Being Earnest in Flatland

By working through the resemblances between Tomasula's Vas: An Opera in Flatland (2004) and Edward Abbott's much earlier Flatland (1884), Pham-Thanh establishes how Tomasula "orchestrates the downfall of the traditional hegemonic masculinity" that defined Abbott's time.