Preface
R. M. Berry and Jeffrey R. Di Leo
Acknowledgments
Introduction: 12 Theses on Fiction's Present
R. M. Berry and Jeffrey R. Di Leo
1. Fiction's Present: Brief Notes
Samuel R. Delany
2. Innovative Fiction and the Poetics of Power:
Gertrude Stein and Christine Brooke-Rose "Do" Language
Christina Milletti
3. To Have Done with Postmodernism: A Plea (or Provocation) for Globalization Studies
Timothy S. Murphy
4. Fiction's Present without Basis
Leslie Scalapino
5. Convinced by Fiction, Convinced by History: Three Novels
Joseph McElroy
6. American World-Fiction in the Longue Durée
Joseph Tabbi
7. Post-postmodern Discontent: Contemporary
Fiction and the Social World
Robert L. McLaughlin
8. Toward the Edge of the Hermetic: Notes on
Raising Fiction from the Dead
Lidia Yuknavitch
9. The Self-Deceiving Muse: Fiction and the
Rationalistic Dictates of the Present
Alan Singer
10. Notes on Fiction and Philosophy
Brian Evenson
11. James, Cather, Vollmann, and the
Distinction of Historical Fiction
Robert L. Caserio
12. Fourteen Notes toward the Musicality of
Creative Disjunction, or Fiction by Collage
Lance Olsen
13. Mount Rushmore: Four Brief Essays on Fictions
Michael Martone
14. Recognition as a Depleted Source in Lynne
Tillman's Motion Sickness
Sue-Im Lee
15. A Modality
Percival Everett
16. Critifictional Reflections on the Pathetic
Condition of the Novel in Our Time
Raymond Federman
17. Henry Miller to Henry James
Ronald Sukenick
18. In Their Own Words: The Collective
Presents Itself
Jerome Klinkowitz
19. World Book
Carole Maso
Afterword: Two Presents
Brian McHale
About the Contributors
Index