I have an essay on the experimental fiction of William Melvin Kelley (especially Dunfords Travels Everywheres) in the new issue of Denver Quarterly. A link to the essay can also be found here.

No doubt the most pressing questions concerning the fiction of William Melvin Kelley are not about its merits, which are considerable and readily enough apparent, but have to be those related to the circumstances of its “rediscovery”: Why did Kelley publish nothing after 1970? (His first novel appeared in 1962, and Kelley died in 2017.) What accounts for the long period of neglect his work endured until recently, when all of his books were brought back into print?. . . . (Continue)