I am making available here an e-book I have written on the current state and status of "experimental fiction." It does draw on essays and reviews previously written and published in various places (including the first iteration of this blog), but I have substantially recast them and added significantly to many of them.
Although the term "experimental fiction" is admittedly awkward and is frequently enough rejected by writers considered exemplary of the practice, I assume that most readers understand what is meant by the term (although in the book I try to clarify what I mean by it) and can accept it as a not very precise but useful way of gathering together writers and works who are "adventurous" in the way that I describe at the beginning of the book.
I have by no means attempted to be comprehensive in my survey of current experimental fiction, but I do believe the writers I examine are representative in their practices and in their tangible but also sometimes conflicted relationship to the experimental writers of the 1960s and 70s whose legacy these present writers have inherited. No small degree of Harold Bloom's "anxiety of influence" is manifested among experimental writers of the past 20-30 years, what could be called the post-postmodernists, both shaping and misshaping the work they have produced. Sometimes it results in something new that successfully extends the postmodern legacy, while in other cases the result is fiction that doesn't so much express this influence as evade it, as I believe my discussions of the writers included here show.
What about outre experimenters such as Arthur S Halsey? It isn't metafiction or ironic in the way you describe Wallace. I like the noir textures he can make. I am not sure if he is "postmodern" or what you call "post-postmodern" but I kind of like it.
Posted by: seth | 06/27/2015 at 02:05 PM