Include me in
The hows and whys of experimental fiction
By Masha Gutkin


'WHAT IS THE present? The present has never been described – how should we describe it?" Robert Glück asks in his introduction to Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative. A sort of investigative manual for cracking open narrative, edited by locals Glück, Mary Burger, and Camille Roy and by Canadian Gail Scott, the collection clamors with the voices of more than 40 North American writers as they grapple with the project of storytelling in our times.

Most of the contributions that make up Biting the Error originally appeared on San Francisco State University's Narrativity Web journal (edited by the same team). The reader may recognize many of the contributors (Leslie Scalapino, Renee Gladman, Chris Kraus, and Aaron Shurin) as intermittently local. "We've gathered a cadre for radical narrative.... Our intent with this anthology is not to normalize a body of work, but to broaden and deepen the questions we can ask the field of fiction," Roy asserts. And though Roy may be referring only to written fiction, the investigations of this anthology have resonance for any artist communicating an experience of being in time.