Everything that happens, happens now. The essays, narratives, and essay-narratives gathered under the thread title, Fictions Present, reaffirm the 'presentist' bias in electronic publishing and in ebr particularly: our non-periodical, continuous publication is designed to keep the archive current and to present critical writing not as an afterthought, but as an integral element in the creation of literary fictions.

Tom LeClair's Passing Trilogy: Recovering Adventure in the Age of Post-Genre

Surveying the decline of adventure as a culturally relevant theme, Steffen Hantke argues that Tom LeClair's Passing Trilogy finds new ways of revalidating adventure for a millennial world of bourgeois security and moderation.

Senseless Resistances: Feeling the Friction in Fiction

Eric Dean Rasmussen introduces a gathering of twelve essays on literary resistances that imagine how a materially engaged and affectively attuned literary culture might play a more transformative role in the emergent network society.

Intensifying Affect

Marco Abel reads recent affect theory and suggests, via discussions of fiction by Don DeLillo, Brian Evenson, and Cormac McCarthy, how literature can cultivate the reader's receptivity to these pre-subjective bodily forces.

A Language of the Ordinary, or the eLEET?

Dave Ciccoricco reviews Michael Joyce's novel of network culture, Was. Seeing an inversion of Russian formalism in Joyce's work, Ciccoricco explores how Joyce's novel attempts to "reconcile the polylinguistic, stylistic, and ludic difficulty" of the text with an "affinity for the quotidian."

Brain Drain Against the Grain: A Report on the International Pynchon Week 2008

Bruno Arich-Gerz reports from Munich on International Pynchon Week, 2008. Finding a retreat to traditional reading strategies, Arich-Gerz wonders whether we have lost more than we gained in the turn against theory.

The Novel at the Center of the World

John Limon surveys the boundaries of the global novel in this review of John Newman's The Fountain at the Center of the World and Naomi Klein's Fences and Windows. Limon traces the trajectory of plot, character, and argument in the genre, as he reads "perhaps the first great global novel."

Postmodernism Redux

Stephen Schryer contrasts narratological and postsecular readings of postmodernism in a review of Gerhard Hoffmann's vast study, From Modernsism to Postmodernism (2005), and John McClure's narrower but more pointed exploration, Partial Faiths (2007).

Paranoid Modernity and the Diagnostics of Cultural Theory

A review of John Farrell's magnificent Paranoia and Modernity: Cervantes to Rousseau, in light of contemporary literary criticism: Where Brian McHale declares an end to postmodernism, and where many discount paranoia as a passing literary interest, reviewer Tim Melley sees postmodern paranoia everywhere. As long as corporations are regarded by law as 'individuals' and conspiracy is the preferred way of understanding political and social systems, it seems that we'll remain in the longue duree of the postmodern moment.

Devoted to Fake

Brian Willems reads a number of fictional and critical texts, from ebr essays to William Gibson's Pattern Recognition, to argue that they all point toward the dissolution of the borders among humans, animals, and machines.

Middle Spaces: Media and the Ethics of Infinitely Demanding

Simon Critchley's study of ethics has been prominently reviewed by literary and cultural theorists, though most treatments accept the premise that ethical relations are primarily among people, that ethics depends mainly on intersubjective relations. This review by Daniel Punday resituates "Infinitely Demanding" in a networked context, one that is constructed by "media, by global flows, and by the larger network swarms which themselves take on an identity." For Punday, an ethics for our time is best found, not by the study of identities and localities, but rather by authors of contemporary fiction such as Jonathan Letham, Susan Daitch, Ishmael Reed, and Toni Cade Bambara.

Utopia's Doubles

Nick Spencer argues for the importance of "anarchistic and spatial factors" in twentieth-century utopian thought despite the resistance to them in the Marxist texts under review by Brown, DeKoven, Jameson, and Puchner.

Home: A Conversation with Richard Powers and Tom LeClair

Scott Hermanson presents a dialogue he conducted with novelists Richard Powers and Tom LeClair, at the University of Cincinnati in 2005. Moderated by Hermanson, the novelists discuss the intricacies of writing about nature, the role of history in the novel, and their fictions' use of imitative form.

Parasitic Fiction

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!

Electronic Media, Identity Politics, and the Rhetoric of Obsolescence

Anthony Enns questions Kathleen Fitzpatrick's link between an anxiety about the displacement of male privilige and the fear of new media technology in postmodern fiction.

Nothing Lasts

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.

"A realm forever beyond reach": William Vollmann's Expelled from Eden and Poor People

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.

Black Postmodernism

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.

What Was 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."

Plagiarism, Creativity, and the Communal Politics of Renewal

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.

Seeking

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.

Geek Love Is All You Need

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

Fictions Present

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

Long Talking Bad Conditions Illinois Blues: A Report on &Now, A Festival of Innovative Writing and Art

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

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

Life Sentences for the New America

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

The Eternal Hourglass of Existence

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