My essay review of the fiction of Steve Tomasula at The Kenyon Review:
Tomasula has cited the influence on his work of such writers as Raymond Federman, Gilbert Sorrentino, and William Gass, all of whom similarly unsettle our usual way of reading—on pages with blocks of text, read sequentially from top to bottom—although none of these writers (aside from Gass in his novella Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife) includes pictorial elements. Tomasula’s own work is thus perhaps best understood as extending their experiments, proceeding under the fundamental assumption that the page—all of his books aside from TOC do take the printed page as fiction’s native medium—is infinitely pliable, a site where the literary artist might create aesthetic effects not confined to the usual felicities of prose style, and might also contribute to a reconception of form that includes but goes beyond reliance on traditional verbal narrative.
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