Honoring the Deviant

As a common English transition, the phrase "and now" is most often used as an introduction to what is coming up next—an association worth noting since this anthology can read as a both a map and a blueprint. The &NOW Awards is a compendium of where experimental literature has brought us to date, but it also is a glimpse into the future of where transgressive literature, in all its possibilities, is leading us. A selection of "the most interesting work" published between 2004 (when the &NOW organization was founded) and 2009, this anthology lets readers place their fingers directly upon the pulse of experimental literature's asymmetrical, off-color, cyborg zombie heart. Like a Noah's Ark of innovative literature, this book gathers representative specimens from all avenues (though no need to choose them two by two; these pieces are genre hermaphrodites that can regenerate all by themselves) in a way that is as close to comprehensive as an organization largely founded upon the impossibility of completion can allow.

Cataloguing the forms and anti-forms experimental writing has employed within our most current history, The &NOW Awards covers a vast spectrum, ranging from Oulipo-style constraints to lists of drug side effects. These are derived texts, poems forged from lines in transcribed interviews, lists of insomniac thoughts that filter leftover panic from childhood obesity. Here pop-culture mélanges divine the past with the present, and stories are written on napkins, drawn with child-like pictures, and infused in faux advertisements. Mark Spitzer writes a spoetry (poetry utilizing spam email subject lines) response to global warming. Because the composition of the pieces in the anthology differs so radically, the impact of form upon a piece can be fully noted and appreciated: space becomes part of the narrative in Teresa Carmody's excerpt from Eye Hole Adore (2008). Narratives are presented in stained notebook pages instead of type. Stephen-Paul Martin's "Food" and Christopher Grimes's "The Public Sentence" are stories told like computer error messages about a system gone awry (each is only one sentence that charges on and on) and Stephanie Strickland's "Huracan's Harp" is part cookbook, including an "Algorithm Recipe" where table staples are replaced with ingredients like "concavity." Throughout the anthology, shapes themselves—of letters and words, fragments and poems, isotopic units that resist or embrace classification—become conscious tools, and these carve new silhouettes for writers to utilize.

The &NOW Awards is also a roll call of the latest manifestos and modes in experimental writing. In Steve Katz's championing of the dysfic (deviant fiction), the fact that it's "right now" is an important aspect of its DNA. Kane X. Faucher introduces the reader to lysicology, a poetics that de-composes using codespeak and schizophrenic-style word and symbol combination. Christine Wertheim's litteral poetics encourage the reader to look at words on a page and follow their literal associations "homophonically, graphically, metaphorically, or metonymically." The pieces are often as playful as they are groundbreaking—The New Anonymous, a literary journal whose manifesto is to only publish anonymous work, contributes the piece "An Interview with Someone" that directly toys with the role of the author.

In defining mininovels, Yuriy Tarnawsky states, "The better is the reader's imagination, the finer will be the result of the reading," a maxim that can fairly be applied to innovative writing as a whole. Perhaps one of the most notable aspects of this anthology is the deep extent to which the reader is also a participant. Natalija Grgorinic and Ognjen Raden's "One, Two, Threeselves" insists that "in the very act of [written word] creation the two of us have each assumed responsibility for the other, and have assumed responsibility for you too." They then ask, "[W]ill you reciprocate?" William Gillespie's "The Story That Teaches You How to Write It" explores narrative construction with an eye towards "making the descriptive prescriptive, turning the model into a score"; the instruction...