My Fiction: Remembering Fifty Years of WorkBy Richard Kostelanetz
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In memory of Lawrence Sterne (1713-1768)
[PREFACE:]
In the fifty years that I’ve been writing fiction, I have produced:
1.) a novella with no more than two words to a paragraph (and then, in one of its two published forms, no more than two words to a book page (One Night e, 1969, 1977).
2.) a visual fiction whose principal narrative action comes from the incremental addition of the alphabet’s letters (In the Beginning, 1971),
3.) words printed on syntactically continuous looping plastic strips that lack beginnings or ends (Infinities-Stories, 2005),
4.) two books of scrupulously Minimal Fictions that are no more than three words in length, most having only two words or one prior to the period (aka full stop) that necessarily concludes the narrative action—one with several to a page for 80 pages (Minimal Fictions, 1993); the other with one fiction to a page for 900 pages (Micro Stories, 2010),
5.) stories that develop through a series of shapes that are composed exclusively of letters or words (“Football Forms,” 1968; Come Here, 1975, respectively),
6.) fictions whose meaning changes with the introduction not of other words but of different configurations of nonverbal imagery (“Obliterate,” 1974; Reincarnations, 1978),
7.) narratives composed entirely of nonrepresentational line-drawings that metamorphose so systemically that each image in the sequence belongs only to its particular place (several volumes of Constructivist Fictions, 1974-1991; March, 1990; CF 1, 2013; CF 2, 2013; Symmetries, 2013),
8.) representational graphic narratives composed of square shapes shifting their places within the fields established by successive pages (Of 4 & 5 Squares, 2014; With 6 Squares, 2014) or chessboard moves (Checkmates: Eight Narratives, 2015),
9.) individual sentences that are either the openings or the closings of otherwise unwritten stories (Openings & Closings, 1975; More Openings & Closings, 2012; A Book of Openings, 2012),
10.) “Skeletal Fictions” with horizontal sequences of words, separated by more horizontal space than is customary, without blatant syntactical connectives (but narrative implications in the spacing nonetheless) (c. 1988, collected in Furtherest Fictions, 2013),
11.) stories composed of just cut-up photographs whose rectangular chips move systemically, as well as symmetrically, through narrative cycles (“Recall,” 1978),
12.) separate modular fictions of photographs that can be read in any order (Reincarnations), of words or line-drawings whose positions in a sequence are interchangeable (and thus can be shuffled) (Rain Rains Rain, 1975, and And So Forth, 1979 respectively),
13.) circular stories that flow from point to point over a single page but lack definite beginnings or ends (in More Short Fictions, 1980; Verbal Fictions, 2012),
14.) narratives, some only a page in length but one as long as a book, composed exclusively of numerals (Exhaustive Parallel Intervals, 1979; Seven Jewish Short Fictions, 2006; 1-99, 2013),
15.) stories composed entirely of words that rhyme with one another–some two words long, others three, most even more populous (“Rhyming,” c. 1990, collected in Furtherest Fictions, 2013),
16.) a fiction composed of sixteen different (but complimentary) narratives interwoven one sentence at a time in print in sixteen different typefaces, on audiotape told one sentence as a time in sixteen purposefully different amplifications of a single voice, and in a performance spoken by sixteen different readers with individually marked parts (“Seductions,” 1980, 1981; A Polygraphic Novel, 2016),
17.) over two thousand single-sentence fictions representing the epiphanies of otherwise unwritten stories (“Epiphanies,” since 1979; Epiphanies, two vols., 2012),
18.) stories composed entirely of words that are anagrams for each other (Furtherest Fictions, 2013) or of phrases anagrammatic to each other (Verbal Fictions),
19.) manuscripts of single-sentence stories that have been offered to periodical editors not to publish in toto but as pools from which they may make their own selections that can then be ordered and designed to their particular tastes (“Epiphanies”; “Openings,” since the late 1980s; “Complete Stories” in the 1990s, “Fulcra Fictions” after 2005),
20.) a sequence of single-sentence stories that, thanks to structural complexities available in English, are each over two hundred words long (“Single-Sentence Stories” in Prose Pieces, 1987),
21.) fiction books published in such alternative forms as tabloid-sized newsprint books (Numbers: Poems & Stories, 1976; One Night Stood, 1977), loose-leaf books (whose pages are gathered in an envelope) (Rain Rains Rain, 1976; And So Forth, 1979), and accordion books that are 4" high and several feet long (Extrapolate, Modulations, both 1975),
22.) one film and a separate videotape whose only imagery is words evoking narratives (Openings & Closings, 1976-78; Video Stories, 2004),
23.) another film with symmetrical abstract fictions (described in #6 above) that metamorphose in systemic sequence (Constructivist Fictions, 1976-77),
24.) fictions that exist primarily on audiotape–that cannot be performed live, whose printed version is no more than a score for its realization (Ululation–An Acoustic Fiction, 1992),
25.) paragraph-long narratives whose successive sentences either add a word to or subtract a word from their immediate predecessors (“Plus/Minus,” 1980),
26.) fictions whose narrative action comes from long words that are split apart to become other shorter words or adding letters to short words to change with each extra digit their semantic thrust (“Recircuits,” “Reroutings,” c. 1990),
27.) simultaneous translations, initially into Chinese, of single-word fictions and, initially into Spanish, of single-sentence fictions that are published on the same page as the English originals (Simultaneous Translations, 2008) or appear in the same place on a video screen (“1001 Stories,” in Action! Yes, 2010),
28.) translations into English of the historic single-sentence fictions of Ramón Gómez de la Serna and Francis Fénéon, writing initially in Spanish and French respectively, both of whose minimal texts were badly or insufficiently translated previously (“Kosti’s Versions,” forthcoming),
29.) a linear narrative whose single-scene paragraphs are no more than two words in length (“Milestones in a Life,” 1970),
30.) a novel-length fiction compressed solely into the form of a family tree (“On Fortune and Fate,” 1969),
31.) two books of “conceptual” fictions, one a novel, the other a collection of stories, in which thick spine-bound collections of evenly cut blank pages are prefaced by a cover with a resonant title and subtitle (“Constructivist”), along with a single-page preface that establish a context for what follows (Tabula Rasa, Inexistences, 1978),
32.) reimaging myself inside or beside an historical figure (“Leonardo & Me,” 1998),
33.) one book of and about Conceptual Fictions (2012),
34.) other books exemplifying the conceptual ideal of framed resonant absence (Richard Kostelanetz’s Loves and Lives, 2013; A Polylogic Novel, 2020),
35.) “Overlapped Minimal Fictions” (1993) in which one continuous stream of letters contains three words, each of which incorporates at its ends at least the two opening letters of its successor or at its beginning at least the concluding two letters of its predecessor,
36.) a cycle of one hundred and twenty-seven erotic stories, each successively one word longer than its immediate predecessor until, at the sixty-four-word length, each new story becomes one word shorter than its immediate predecessor, thus incremental and then deincremental (“More or Less,” c. 1980),
37.) Two-Element Stories (2003) and Three-Element Stories (1998) that depend upon a period (aka a “full stop”) to make the implicitly preceding disconnected words become a skeletal narrative,
38.) a Condensed Novel (2008) whose fourteen chapters are each a single sentence long,
39.) Contagion (2003), a narrative fifty feet long on clear acetate,
40.) Running Headers (2015) and Running Footers (2015) weave fiction(s) wholly in the visibly marginal headings of otherwise blank pages,
41.) a visual fiction five times higher than it is wide (“The True Adventures of Don Juan,” 2012),
42.) 99 Video Stories whose sequence is randomized, to exploit a capability unavailable in spine-bound print (c. 2010),
43.) “Micro Novels” and “Micro Novellas” that resemble each other in brief length but differ as genres by range and number of words,
44.) Fict/ions and “Fulcra Fictions” that depend upon discovering within a single word two shorter words that, concluding with a period, make a narrative,
45.) GhoStories (2012), a book where within one long word is boldfaced a shorter word so that the two suggest a narrative,
46.) One-Letter Changes (2013), another book in which a narrative results from placing beside one word a second (and sometimes a third and forth) differing from its predecessor in the change of only a single letter,
47.) single words meant to suggest movement from here to elsewhere, which is to say narrative (Monoepics, 2013),
48.) Homophones (2013, 2019), whose narratives result from positioning next to each other two words that sound alike even if spelled differently, that must be read by the eye, because they make no sense if heard aloud,
49.) short narratives whose forward movement results mostly from the reader’s turning over the book’s pages (Page Turners, 2014),
50.) A to Z: Four Novellas (2015), which consists of four alphabets, each successor in an increasingly more obscure typeface,
51.) Love: A Narrative (2016) has only that word suggesting a narrative by becoming smaller and larger on only recto pages,
52.) Enfoldings (2016) are very short descriptions so fantastic that they are necessarily fictional,
53.) “Truncated” fictions consisting of single-sentence “episodes” that do not obviously follow from each other (Furtherest Fictions, 2013),
54.) “Discontinuous Stories” from which many possibly connecting words are missing (Further Furtherest Fictions, 2018),
55.) infinite narratives composed by writing on each side of a card individual words that lead into each other (To&Fro& (2013),
56.) Unscience Fictions (2014) that move beyond known possibilities, both above and below,
57.) several volumes of pristine erotica describing seduction without employing “dirty words” or explicit descriptions (Erotic Minimal Fictions, 2012: Him & Her, 2013; Lovings: A Book of Stories, 2015: A Polygraphic Novel; Translovings: A Collection of Stories, 2016; Excelsior, 2017; Amen, 2017).
58.) stories that fold into themselves, rather than going somewhere (Enfoldings 2016),
59.) a four-hour film composed of verbal and visual Epiphanies that have no connection to each other, either vertically or horizontally, other than common fictional structure (1981-93),
60.) videotapes whose abstract visual syntheses become an accompanying counterpoint to the more concrete audio narration (Seductions/Relationships, 1987; Secret Stories, 2004),
61.) rewritings of classic stories to make them contemporary and personal (“Kosty the Ghostwriter,” 2010; Kosti’s Pep Dream, 2013; American Writing, 2018),
62.) reinterpretations of a certain mode of visual art that I establish by putting only my words (within a picture frame Narrative Pictures, 2015),
63.) Epitaphs (2016) with pictures of gravestones whose fictional inscriptions portray lives of various sorts,
64.) book-length narratives about the process of writing such a narrative, each with only one word to a page (Writing a Novel, 2016; Writing Another Novel, 2016; Rewriting a Novel, 2017),
65.) an erotic memoir consisting only of typographically daunting first names whose common theme is ambiguous gender (Kosti’s Lovers, 2020),
66.) a narrative with implicit greater distances between the sentences that thus appear singly on each book page (An Episodic Novel, 2015),
67.) a book-length narrative with several chapters, each marked by its own style of typogarbage, incidentally realizing a Mikhail Bahktin ideal impossible in the mid-20th Century (A Polyphonic Novel, 2016),
68.) a novel-length narrative whose chapters consist solely of roman numerals consecutively only on recto pages (100 Chapters: A Novel, 2016),
69.) an extended exploration of erotic experience with narrators who are not straight males (Translovings: A Collection of Stories, 2016),
70.) brief narratives composed only from the source word that introduces it and thus becomes its title (Parthogenesis, 2020),
71.) a single continuous line of typogarbage that runs over 100 pages (A Mononarrative, 2019),
72.) book-length abstract graphic narratives that differ from more familiar “graphic novels” (aka higher comics) as nonrepresentational images that metamorphose over successive pages (Modulations and Extrapolate, both 1975, and Symmetries, 2013),
73.) an ebook in which the reader is invited to choose his or her own typeface and size for reading them (More Micro Stories, 2017),
74.) minimal science fictions, evoking alternative world(s) with only a few words to a sentence (Ficciones, 2017),
75.) a book with several stories running horizontally and nonsynchronously on horizontal platforms atop each other over successive pages (Unscience Fictions, 2015),
76.) linear narratives that depend upon the same word(s) being progressively enlarged or, less frequently, reduced only on successive recto pages (Joy, 2015; Presence, 2016),
77.) reframing a classic fiction with the addition of my own complimentary text (The Death and Redeath of Ivan Ilyitch, 2016),
78.) In FlipBook & Flipbook (2016), reviving an old form approximating a pre-film narrative (sometimes called a Zoetrope), but here only letters change in the same place on successive pages, creating new words on every recto. The second book has the same text with a smaller format, the two books again exploring how the same materials, here only words typically, can seem different if they appear in radically different formats,
79.) ß––-à (2016) containing two-word narratives that can be read in either direction from the edges of a two-page spread,
80.) single English words that, when typeset into a continuous circle, incorporate other shorter words that complement their host in suggesting a narrative (Ouroborostories, 2018),
81.) a book-length narrative told entirely with quotation marks in 33 typefaces, A Polylogic Novel (2020), with different amounts of empty space between each typographic pair, in sum representing the possible statements by 33 different narrators, in the tradition of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930),
82.) a narrative, perhaps fictional, composed of successive pages making a private text progressively more visible (Deredacting, 2020)
83.) a narrative, superficially factual but surely fictional, of female surnames as Kosty’s Lovers (2020), Kosty becoming Kosti’s fictional alter ego;
84.) Flash Fragment Fictions (2020) of just incomplete sentences from otherwise invisible longer narratives;
85.) several narratives in which I try to establish the continuing validity of “novella” as a category for fictional works longer than a story but shorter than a novel,
86.) 3-Element Stories (1998) and 2-Element Stories (2003), in which a fixed limited number of words appear scattered on a book page along with a single closing punctuation mark,
87.) a collection of Multipath Stories (2020), each with a typeface unique to itself, from which the reader is invited to cut away pages other than the title and the conclusion (that remain attached to the book’s spine) and then shuffle the sequence of lose pages within the fixed frames,
88.) reinterpreting the tradition of livre d’artiste in which physically separate illustrations accompany a text, in Kosti’s Poe Maelström (2015) where my pictures appear on the same page as every sentence of Edgar Allan Poe’s classic story,
89.) several “microscopic narratives” on a single page, collected as Fiction Fields (2016);
90.) sentences that are reordered in systemic ways to produce different emphases of the same words and the same narrative motifs (Foreshortenings & Other Stories, 1978), if not radically different fictions,
91.) a multitude of progressions from the letter A in the upper left-hand corner of the page to the letter Z in the lower left-hand corner (From 1000 Novels, 2017),
92.) a book-length erotic narrative that progresses with only one word to every book page (Excelsior, 2017; Amen, 2017),
93.) a narrative several hundred pages long containing only the fictional epithet “and then” on every page, printed in two formats with the smaller having roughly 25% of the other’s dimensions, incidentally raising the question of whether this is a two-word novel or a 757-word novel with only two discrete words (And Then, 2017; And Then Again, 2020),
94.) sentences that appear either in the middle or at the end of otherwise non-existent stories (Endings & Middles, 2018),
95.) Incremental Narratives (2018), whose fictional engine comes from adding words that redirect the meaning of the previous string,
96.) a collections of macabre science fictions, in How Shall I Die (2018),
97.) a narrative about a single faintly printed statement becoming ever more slightly darker in the course of the book (Gradations, 2019),
98.) short narratives composed with short words found within the long works that become their titles (Parthogenesis, 2020),
99.) probably a few other departures whose character cannot yet, for better or worse, be neatly encapsulated (???),
100.) not just no juvenilia, though in college I outlined a novel echoing Nat West’s A Day of the Locust; but no conventional fiction either–absolutely none–which is to say nothing that could pass a university course/workshop in "fiction writing" (and perhaps get me a job teaching such), and thus no familiar milestone from which simple-minded critics could then measure “development,”
101.) the purest oeuvre of fiction as fiction–in the great tradition of Cervantes, Sterne, and Chekhov, scarcely autobiographical, scarcely compromised by vulgar considerations–that anyone has ever done.
***
These fictions of mine have appeared in over fifty literary magazines, while over a dozen volumes of these fictions have appeared in print (and my critical essays were collected as The Old Fictions and the New, 1987). Entries on me featuring my fiction appear in both the Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature (1995) and A Reader’s Guide to 20th Century Writers (Oxford, 1995). Nonetheless, reviews of individual books have been few, and neither commercial contracts for this work nor grants for fiction writing have come my way. No institution has ever asked me to teach a “fiction workshop.” Only one story was ever anthologized by someone else (Eugene Wildman, in his Experiments in Prose, back in 1969).
Would “a line of milk bottles of a bodega shelf constitute fiction,” the fiction critic Jerome Klinkowitz asked of an earlier draft of this memoir? Yes, if they contained different amounts, because any explanation of how they got that way would necessarily become a narrative.
In my fiction as in my poetry, I’ve tried to be “the most inventive ever,” certainly in America, and probably have succeeded with an ambition cultivated by a few. At minimum, may I think I’ve expanded the world of fiction writing, establishing new turfs that others will cultivate, no doubt in different ways.
[PREFACE:]
In the fifty years that I’ve been writing fiction, I have produced:
1.) a novella with no more than two words to a paragraph (and then, in one of its two published forms, no more than two words to a book page (One Night e, 1969, 1977).
2.) a visual fiction whose principal narrative action comes from the incremental addition of the alphabet’s letters (In the Beginning, 1971),
3.) words printed on syntactically continuous looping plastic strips that lack beginnings or ends (Infinities-Stories, 2005),
4.) two books of scrupulously Minimal Fictions that are no more than three words in length, most having only two words or one prior to the period (aka full stop) that necessarily concludes the narrative action—one with several to a page for 80 pages (Minimal Fictions, 1993); the other with one fiction to a page for 900 pages (Micro Stories, 2010),
5.) stories that develop through a series of shapes that are composed exclusively of letters or words (“Football Forms,” 1968; Come Here, 1975, respectively),
6.) fictions whose meaning changes with the introduction not of other words but of different configurations of nonverbal imagery (“Obliterate,” 1974; Reincarnations, 1978),
7.) narratives composed entirely of nonrepresentational line-drawings that metamorphose so systemically that each image in the sequence belongs only to its particular place (several volumes of Constructivist Fictions, 1974-1991; March, 1990; CF 1, 2013; CF 2, 2013; Symmetries, 2013),
8.) representational graphic narratives composed of square shapes shifting their places within the fields established by successive pages (Of 4 & 5 Squares, 2014; With 6 Squares, 2014) or chessboard moves (Checkmates: Eight Narratives, 2015),
9.) individual sentences that are either the openings or the closings of otherwise unwritten stories (Openings & Closings, 1975; More Openings & Closings, 2012; A Book of Openings, 2012),
10.) “Skeletal Fictions” with horizontal sequences of words, separated by more horizontal space than is customary, without blatant syntactical connectives (but narrative implications in the spacing nonetheless) (c. 1988, collected in Furtherest Fictions, 2013),
11.) stories composed of just cut-up photographs whose rectangular chips move systemically, as well as symmetrically, through narrative cycles (“Recall,” 1978),
12.) separate modular fictions of photographs that can be read in any order (Reincarnations), of words or line-drawings whose positions in a sequence are interchangeable (and thus can be shuffled) (Rain Rains Rain, 1975, and And So Forth, 1979 respectively),
13.) circular stories that flow from point to point over a single page but lack definite beginnings or ends (in More Short Fictions, 1980; Verbal Fictions, 2012),
14.) narratives, some only a page in length but one as long as a book, composed exclusively of numerals (Exhaustive Parallel Intervals, 1979; Seven Jewish Short Fictions, 2006; 1-99, 2013),
15.) stories composed entirely of words that rhyme with one another–some two words long, others three, most even more populous (“Rhyming,” c. 1990, collected in Furtherest Fictions, 2013),
16.) a fiction composed of sixteen different (but complimentary) narratives interwoven one sentence at a time in print in sixteen different typefaces, on audiotape told one sentence as a time in sixteen purposefully different amplifications of a single voice, and in a performance spoken by sixteen different readers with individually marked parts (“Seductions,” 1980, 1981; A Polygraphic Novel, 2016),
17.) over two thousand single-sentence fictions representing the epiphanies of otherwise unwritten stories (“Epiphanies,” since 1979; Epiphanies, two vols., 2012),
18.) stories composed entirely of words that are anagrams for each other (Furtherest Fictions, 2013) or of phrases anagrammatic to each other (Verbal Fictions),
19.) manuscripts of single-sentence stories that have been offered to periodical editors not to publish in toto but as pools from which they may make their own selections that can then be ordered and designed to their particular tastes (“Epiphanies”; “Openings,” since the late 1980s; “Complete Stories” in the 1990s, “Fulcra Fictions” after 2005),
20.) a sequence of single-sentence stories that, thanks to structural complexities available in English, are each over two hundred words long (“Single-Sentence Stories” in Prose Pieces, 1987),
21.) fiction books published in such alternative forms as tabloid-sized newsprint books (Numbers: Poems & Stories, 1976; One Night Stood, 1977), loose-leaf books (whose pages are gathered in an envelope) (Rain Rains Rain, 1976; And So Forth, 1979), and accordion books that are 4" high and several feet long (Extrapolate, Modulations, both 1975),
22.) one film and a separate videotape whose only imagery is words evoking narratives (Openings & Closings, 1976-78; Video Stories, 2004),
23.) another film with symmetrical abstract fictions (described in #6 above) that metamorphose in systemic sequence (Constructivist Fictions, 1976-77),
24.) fictions that exist primarily on audiotape–that cannot be performed live, whose printed version is no more than a score for its realization (Ululation–An Acoustic Fiction, 1992),
25.) paragraph-long narratives whose successive sentences either add a word to or subtract a word from their immediate predecessors (“Plus/Minus,” 1980),
26.) fictions whose narrative action comes from long words that are split apart to become other shorter words or adding letters to short words to change with each extra digit their semantic thrust (“Recircuits,” “Reroutings,” c. 1990),
27.) simultaneous translations, initially into Chinese, of single-word fictions and, initially into Spanish, of single-sentence fictions that are published on the same page as the English originals (Simultaneous Translations, 2008) or appear in the same place on a video screen (“1001 Stories,” in Action! Yes, 2010),
28.) translations into English of the historic single-sentence fictions of Ramón Gómez de la Serna and Francis Fénéon, writing initially in Spanish and French respectively, both of whose minimal texts were badly or insufficiently translated previously (“Kosti’s Versions,” forthcoming),
29.) a linear narrative whose single-scene paragraphs are no more than two words in length (“Milestones in a Life,” 1970),
30.) a novel-length fiction compressed solely into the form of a family tree (“On Fortune and Fate,” 1969),
31.) two books of “conceptual” fictions, one a novel, the other a collection of stories, in which thick spine-bound collections of evenly cut blank pages are prefaced by a cover with a resonant title and subtitle (“Constructivist”), along with a single-page preface that establish a context for what follows (Tabula Rasa, Inexistences, 1978),
32.) reimaging myself inside or beside an historical figure (“Leonardo & Me,” 1998),
33.) one book of and about Conceptual Fictions (2012),
34.) other books exemplifying the conceptual ideal of framed resonant absence (Richard Kostelanetz’s Loves and Lives, 2013; A Polylogic Novel, 2020),
35.) “Overlapped Minimal Fictions” (1993) in which one continuous stream of letters contains three words, each of which incorporates at its ends at least the two opening letters of its successor or at its beginning at least the concluding two letters of its predecessor,
36.) a cycle of one hundred and twenty-seven erotic stories, each successively one word longer than its immediate predecessor until, at the sixty-four-word length, each new story becomes one word shorter than its immediate predecessor, thus incremental and then deincremental (“More or Less,” c. 1980),
37.) Two-Element Stories (2003) and Three-Element Stories (1998) that depend upon a period (aka a “full stop”) to make the implicitly preceding disconnected words become a skeletal narrative,
38.) a Condensed Novel (2008) whose fourteen chapters are each a single sentence long,
39.) Contagion (2003), a narrative fifty feet long on clear acetate,
40.) Running Headers (2015) and Running Footers (2015) weave fiction(s) wholly in the visibly marginal headings of otherwise blank pages,
41.) a visual fiction five times higher than it is wide (“The True Adventures of Don Juan,” 2012),
42.) 99 Video Stories whose sequence is randomized, to exploit a capability unavailable in spine-bound print (c. 2010),
43.) “Micro Novels” and “Micro Novellas” that resemble each other in brief length but differ as genres by range and number of words,
44.) Fict/ions and “Fulcra Fictions” that depend upon discovering within a single word two shorter words that, concluding with a period, make a narrative,
45.) GhoStories (2012), a book where within one long word is boldfaced a shorter word so that the two suggest a narrative,
46.) One-Letter Changes (2013), another book in which a narrative results from placing beside one word a second (and sometimes a third and forth) differing from its predecessor in the change of only a single letter,
47.) single words meant to suggest movement from here to elsewhere, which is to say narrative (Monoepics, 2013),
48.) Homophones (2013, 2019), whose narratives result from positioning next to each other two words that sound alike even if spelled differently, that must be read by the eye, because they make no sense if heard aloud,
49.) short narratives whose forward movement results mostly from the reader’s turning over the book’s pages (Page Turners, 2014),
50.) A to Z: Four Novellas (2015), which consists of four alphabets, each successor in an increasingly more obscure typeface,
51.) Love: A Narrative (2016) has only that word suggesting a narrative by becoming smaller and larger on only recto pages,
52.) Enfoldings (2016) are very short descriptions so fantastic that they are necessarily fictional,
53.) “Truncated” fictions consisting of single-sentence “episodes” that do not obviously follow from each other (Furtherest Fictions, 2013),
54.) “Discontinuous Stories” from which many possibly connecting words are missing (Further Furtherest Fictions, 2018),
55.) infinite narratives composed by writing on each side of a card individual words that lead into each other (To&Fro& (2013),
56.) Unscience Fictions (2014) that move beyond known possibilities, both above and below,
57.) several volumes of pristine erotica describing seduction without employing “dirty words” or explicit descriptions (Erotic Minimal Fictions, 2012: Him & Her, 2013; Lovings: A Book of Stories, 2015: A Polygraphic Novel; Translovings: A Collection of Stories, 2016; Excelsior, 2017; Amen, 2017).
58.) stories that fold into themselves, rather than going somewhere (Enfoldings 2016),
59.) a four-hour film composed of verbal and visual Epiphanies that have no connection to each other, either vertically or horizontally, other than common fictional structure (1981-93),
60.) videotapes whose abstract visual syntheses become an accompanying counterpoint to the more concrete audio narration (Seductions/Relationships, 1987; Secret Stories, 2004),
61.) rewritings of classic stories to make them contemporary and personal (“Kosty the Ghostwriter,” 2010; Kosti’s Pep Dream, 2013; American Writing, 2018),
62.) reinterpretations of a certain mode of visual art that I establish by putting only my words (within a picture frame Narrative Pictures, 2015),
63.) Epitaphs (2016) with pictures of gravestones whose fictional inscriptions portray lives of various sorts,
64.) book-length narratives about the process of writing such a narrative, each with only one word to a page (Writing a Novel, 2016; Writing Another Novel, 2016; Rewriting a Novel, 2017),
65.) an erotic memoir consisting only of typographically daunting first names whose common theme is ambiguous gender (Kosti’s Lovers, 2020),
66.) a narrative with implicit greater distances between the sentences that thus appear singly on each book page (An Episodic Novel, 2015),
67.) a book-length narrative with several chapters, each marked by its own style of typogarbage, incidentally realizing a Mikhail Bahktin ideal impossible in the mid-20th Century (A Polyphonic Novel, 2016),
68.) a novel-length narrative whose chapters consist solely of roman numerals consecutively only on recto pages (100 Chapters: A Novel, 2016),
69.) an extended exploration of erotic experience with narrators who are not straight males (Translovings: A Collection of Stories, 2016),
70.) brief narratives composed only from the source word that introduces it and thus becomes its title (Parthogenesis, 2020),
71.) a single continuous line of typogarbage that runs over 100 pages (A Mononarrative, 2019),
72.) book-length abstract graphic narratives that differ from more familiar “graphic novels” (aka higher comics) as nonrepresentational images that metamorphose over successive pages (Modulations and Extrapolate, both 1975, and Symmetries, 2013),
73.) an ebook in which the reader is invited to choose his or her own typeface and size for reading them (More Micro Stories, 2017),
74.) minimal science fictions, evoking alternative world(s) with only a few words to a sentence (Ficciones, 2017),
75.) a book with several stories running horizontally and nonsynchronously on horizontal platforms atop each other over successive pages (Unscience Fictions, 2015),
76.) linear narratives that depend upon the same word(s) being progressively enlarged or, less frequently, reduced only on successive recto pages (Joy, 2015; Presence, 2016),
77.) reframing a classic fiction with the addition of my own complimentary text (The Death and Redeath of Ivan Ilyitch, 2016),
78.) In FlipBook & Flipbook (2016), reviving an old form approximating a pre-film narrative (sometimes called a Zoetrope), but here only letters change in the same place on successive pages, creating new words on every recto. The second book has the same text with a smaller format, the two books again exploring how the same materials, here only words typically, can seem different if they appear in radically different formats,
79.) ß––-à (2016) containing two-word narratives that can be read in either direction from the edges of a two-page spread,
80.) single English words that, when typeset into a continuous circle, incorporate other shorter words that complement their host in suggesting a narrative (Ouroborostories, 2018),
81.) a book-length narrative told entirely with quotation marks in 33 typefaces, A Polylogic Novel (2020), with different amounts of empty space between each typographic pair, in sum representing the possible statements by 33 different narrators, in the tradition of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930),
82.) a narrative, perhaps fictional, composed of successive pages making a private text progressively more visible (Deredacting, 2020)
83.) a narrative, superficially factual but surely fictional, of female surnames as Kosty’s Lovers (2020), Kosty becoming Kosti’s fictional alter ego;
84.) Flash Fragment Fictions (2020) of just incomplete sentences from otherwise invisible longer narratives;
85.) several narratives in which I try to establish the continuing validity of “novella” as a category for fictional works longer than a story but shorter than a novel,
86.) 3-Element Stories (1998) and 2-Element Stories (2003), in which a fixed limited number of words appear scattered on a book page along with a single closing punctuation mark,
87.) a collection of Multipath Stories (2020), each with a typeface unique to itself, from which the reader is invited to cut away pages other than the title and the conclusion (that remain attached to the book’s spine) and then shuffle the sequence of lose pages within the fixed frames,
88.) reinterpreting the tradition of livre d’artiste in which physically separate illustrations accompany a text, in Kosti’s Poe Maelström (2015) where my pictures appear on the same page as every sentence of Edgar Allan Poe’s classic story,
89.) several “microscopic narratives” on a single page, collected as Fiction Fields (2016);
90.) sentences that are reordered in systemic ways to produce different emphases of the same words and the same narrative motifs (Foreshortenings & Other Stories, 1978), if not radically different fictions,
91.) a multitude of progressions from the letter A in the upper left-hand corner of the page to the letter Z in the lower left-hand corner (From 1000 Novels, 2017),
92.) a book-length erotic narrative that progresses with only one word to every book page (Excelsior, 2017; Amen, 2017),
93.) a narrative several hundred pages long containing only the fictional epithet “and then” on every page, printed in two formats with the smaller having roughly 25% of the other’s dimensions, incidentally raising the question of whether this is a two-word novel or a 757-word novel with only two discrete words (And Then, 2017; And Then Again, 2020),
94.) sentences that appear either in the middle or at the end of otherwise non-existent stories (Endings & Middles, 2018),
95.) Incremental Narratives (2018), whose fictional engine comes from adding words that redirect the meaning of the previous string,
96.) a collections of macabre science fictions, in How Shall I Die (2018),
97.) a narrative about a single faintly printed statement becoming ever more slightly darker in the course of the book (Gradations, 2019),
98.) short narratives composed with short words found within the long works that become their titles (Parthogenesis, 2020),
99.) probably a few other departures whose character cannot yet, for better or worse, be neatly encapsulated (???),
100.) not just no juvenilia, though in college I outlined a novel echoing Nat West’s A Day of the Locust; but no conventional fiction either–absolutely none–which is to say nothing that could pass a university course/workshop in "fiction writing" (and perhaps get me a job teaching such), and thus no familiar milestone from which simple-minded critics could then measure “development,”
101.) the purest oeuvre of fiction as fiction–in the great tradition of Cervantes, Sterne, and Chekhov, scarcely autobiographical, scarcely compromised by vulgar considerations–that anyone has ever done.
***
These fictions of mine have appeared in over fifty literary magazines, while over a dozen volumes of these fictions have appeared in print (and my critical essays were collected as The Old Fictions and the New, 1987). Entries on me featuring my fiction appear in both the Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature (1995) and A Reader’s Guide to 20th Century Writers (Oxford, 1995). Nonetheless, reviews of individual books have been few, and neither commercial contracts for this work nor grants for fiction writing have come my way. No institution has ever asked me to teach a “fiction workshop.” Only one story was ever anthologized by someone else (Eugene Wildman, in his Experiments in Prose, back in 1969).
Would “a line of milk bottles of a bodega shelf constitute fiction,” the fiction critic Jerome Klinkowitz asked of an earlier draft of this memoir? Yes, if they contained different amounts, because any explanation of how they got that way would necessarily become a narrative.
In my fiction as in my poetry, I’ve tried to be “the most inventive ever,” certainly in America, and probably have succeeded with an ambition cultivated by a few. At minimum, may I think I’ve expanded the world of fiction writing, establishing new turfs that others will cultivate, no doubt in different ways.
Richard Kostelanetz has been publishing radically alternative stories, mostly in literary magazines, for nearly five decades. As many of his recent titles explore the territories between literature and book-art, he has also produced fictions for extended surfaces (Contagion: A Novel, 2004); audiotape (Seductions, 1981; Acoustic Fictions, 1992); videotape (Video Fictions, 2004); and film (Epiphanies, 1981-1993).
This work has been recognized in histories of American literature since the 1970s, most visibly in the Columbia History of American Literature (1989). Individual entries on his fiction have appeared in the encyclopedic Contemporary Novelists since the 1970s, while the entries on Kostelanetz in A Reader's Guide to 20th Century Writing (1995) and the Merriam‑Webster Encyclopedia of Literature (1995) have emphasized his fiction. (His name is one of a thousand living and dead in the first volume and one of ten thousand from all time in the second volume.)
Kostelanetz has also edited three anthologies exclusively of fiction, Twelve from the Sixties (1967), Future's Fictions (1971), and Breakthrough Fictioneers (1973), in addition to several other collections including fiction along with other kinds of work. His fugitive fiction criticism was collected as The Old Fictions and the New (1987). Other Kostelanetz books have poetry, experimental prose, performance texts, criticism, and cultural history. His prints, book-art, audiotapes, videotapes, holograms, and films have been exhibited around the world. He was born in 1940 in New York City, where he still lives, unaffiliated.