Stephen Burn considers Tom LeClair's recent novel through the lens of the latter's own critical work on postmodern fiction, while also excavating the novel's relation to Faulkner's tale of racial empire building, Absalom, Absalom!

In "Nothing Lasts," Stephen Schryer considers Tom LeClair's Passing On and The Liquidators as paired novels, one immersing the reader in the maelstrom of the social and economic systems that shape contemporary life, the other shielding the reader from those systems. Unlike the massive novels from the seventies that fascinated LeClair the critic, Schryer finds the novelist a "literary miniaturist," seeking "concise synecdoches for the larger systems" his books evoke.

Jeff Bursey argues for a coherent, if unlikely, set of predecessors for William T. Vollmann: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Blaise Cendrars, and John Cowper Powys. In the process of tracing this genealogy, Bursey defends Vollmann against critics who attack his alleged objectification of his subjects - prostitutes, the poor, and victims of violence.

Amy J. Elias reviews Madhu Dubey's second book Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism and gauges the argument that we can locate within literary history a distinctive African American strain of postmodernism.

Brian McHale looks back on the movement in "What Was Postmodernism?" He contrasts postmodernism's canonization with critical constructions of modernism, and moves through contemporary painting to reflect on intersections between the violence of recent history and postmodernism, as the postwar world lived "in the ruins of our own civilization, if only in our imaginations."

As Christian Moraru argues here that the new is still the objective in contemporary writing. But writers and artists make it by making it anew rather than new ("Get it used," Andrei Codrescu invites us), a new not so much novel as renovated, reframed and reproduced rather than produced, which by the same token redefines and advertises authorship as deliberate plagiarism.

Rob Swigart's "Seeking" is a clever and funny story whose roots lie in the materialization of internet interdating connections. Moving through the technological and media reductions of desire, Swigart parallels the overarching theme of "seeking" with a form that is itself punctuated with questions.

Steven Shaviro reviews Shelley Jackson's Half Life, the first print-based novel by a pioneering hypertextualist.

Joseph Tabbi introduces the thread and gathers prior essays by fiction writers on fiction writing.

Ted Pelton writes an in-depth account not just of the &Now Conference at Lake Forest College but of the state of experimental writers and small press publishing.

"Dispersion" is a short-story by Rob Swigart.

Tim Keane reviews David Matlin's Prisons: Inside the New America.

Sascha Pöhlmann reviews Lance Olsen's 2006 novel Nietzsche's Kisses.

Reiichi Miura considers the worldwide reception of Japanese writer Haruki Murakami and charts a course for a fiction where nationalism loses relevance.