Critical Fiction — An Annotated Reading List
I — Books & Short Stories
Walter ABISH
99 : The New Meaning. Burning Deck Press, 1990.
Interrogates the “fragmentary narrative” through the use of appropriated
texts.
Jorge Luis BORGES
“The Garden of Forking Paths”, etc., in Ficciones. Grove
Press, 1962.
— Other Inquisitions 1937-1952. Translated by Ruth Simms. University of
Texas, 1964; paperback, 1993.
— “There Are More Things”, in The Book of Sand. Translated by Norman
Thomas di Giovanni. E. P. Dutton, 1977.
Angela CARTER
“The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe” (Interzone 1, 1982), and “John
Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore” (1988), in Burning
Your Boats. The Collected Short Stories. Penguin paperback, c. 1995.
Guy DAVENPORT
“1830”, in Tatlin! Scribners, 1974; Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1982, paperback.
Edgar Allan Poe in St. Petersburg.
—“Belinda’s World Tour” and “The Concord Sonata”, in A Table of Green Fields,
New Directions, 1993.
Postcards written to a little girl by Franz Kafka in the persona of her lost
doll; and the life and inquiries of Henry David Thoreau.
Avram DAVIDSON
“One Morning with Samuel, Dorothy & William” (Asimov’s,
December 1988), in The Other Nineteenth Century, eds. Grania Davis and
Henry Wessells.
Tor, 2001.
Eileen GUNN
“Michael Swanwick and Samuel R. Delany at the Joyce Kilmer Service Area,
March 2005. Output from a nostalgic, if somewhat misinformed, guydavenport storybot,
in the year 2115. Transcribed by Eileen Gunn”. Foundation 101,
Winter
2007/2008 ; in Questionable Practices, Small Beer Press, [2014], pp. 210-214.
John KESSEL
“Another Orphan” The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September 1982; collected in Meeting in Infinity, Arkham House, 1992 ; in The Collected Kessel, Baen Books, 2012.
“Herman Melville is my hero. [. . .] I had the idea of stranding a contemporary man in Moby-Dick” (from the author’s afterword).
Tom LA FARGE
Zuntig. Sun and Moon, 2001.
Life and Conversation of Animals. Proteotypes, 2010.
Haniel Long
Interlinear to Cabeza de Vaca. His Relation of the Journey from Florida to the Pacific 1528-1536. Writers’ Editions, 1936.
Jean RHYS
Wide Sargasso Sea. André Deutsch, 1966.
Discussed as CRITICAL FICTION.
Joanna RUSS
“The Zanzibar Cat” and “The Extraordinary Voyages of Amélie
Bertrand”, in The Zanzibar Cat. Arkham House, 1976.
Avery SMALL-HAMPTON
A Hand-List of the Published Work in Prose and Verse of The Rev. T. Hartington
Quince, M.A. (1890–1990). Compiled by Avery Small-Hampton. With an Introduction
by Nicholas Jenkins. [Printed for private circulation, 1991]
Wendy WALKER
“A Document from the Secret Archive of Grent Oude Wayl, Esquire”,
in Parnassus 20:1&2 (1995), pp. 338-355, and collected in My
Man and Other Critical
Fictions. Temporary Culture, 2011.
Henry WESSELLS
“Book Becoming Power” and “Appraisal at Edgewood” and “Ten
Bears”, in Another green world. Temporary Culture, 2003.
Janwillem van de WETERING
Judge Dee Plays His Lute: A Play and Selected Mystery Stories. Bar Harbor,
Maine: Wonderly Press, 1997.
Discussed as CRITICAL FICTION.
Tom WHALEN
“On Henry James’s ‘The Great Condition.’” Marginalia 5, 89-90.
INTERVIEWED (with additional checklist of critical fictions).
Gene WOLFE
“The Eyeflash Miracles”(1976), in The Best of Gene Wolfe. Tor, 1989.
II — Works contributing to the evolution and understanding of the Critical Fiction
If It Had Happened Otherwise. Lapses into Imaginary History. Edited
by J. C.
Squire. Longmans, Green, 1932.
The « Sources of the Nile » in counterfactual history,
the most notable here being Winston Churchill’s “If Lee Had Not
Won the Battle of Gettysburg”; certain of the “lapses” perform
as critical examinations of the literary work of their subjects (Byron, Swinburne).
Michael BISHOP
“The Orchid Forest: A Metafactual Introduction to The Crystal Cosmos by Rhys
Hughes by Miguel Obispo”. The New York Review of Science Fiction 19:6 (February
2007).
A playful and allusive fiction that also performs the
function stated in its title; indeed when I first read E.F. Bleiler’s essay on
Rhys Hughes in Supernatural Fiction Writers (2002), I thought
Bleiler had invented him.
P. H. CANNON
Scream for Jeeves. A Parody. Illustrated by J.C. Eckhardt. Wodecraft
Press, [1994].
Parody is a sometimes more fluid mode, as the imitative (or pastiche) can
sometimes co-exist with the transformative aspect: Pulptime (1984)
by Peter Cannon is HPL-meets-Sherlock Holmes fan fiction; in Scream for Jeeves,
something else occurs at the same time as the pastiche.
Stanislaw LEM
A Perfect Vacuum. Perfect Reviews of Nonexistent Books. Translated from the
Polish by Michael Kandel. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978.
“
[A] brilliantly innovative series of [. . .] glosses at the borderland of fiction
and treatise [. . .] which simultaneously characterize and persiflage their
targets” — Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.
Paul METCALF
The Collected Works of Paul Metcalf. 3 vols.,
Coffee House Press, 1997.
(Many of Metcalf’s pieces do what the critical fiction does, but take
historical events and/or texts as their subject.)
Frederick ROLFE
Frederick Rolfe’s “Reviews of Unwritten Books”. Edited and
with notes by Donald Weeks. 4 vols., Tragara Press, 1985-8. Essays published
in The Monthly Review, February to June 1903 and The Gentleman’s Magazine,
December 1904.
Not strictly critical fictions, but relevant for Rolfe’s practice of
upending chronology in his collisions of author and incident, as in “Machiavelli’s
Despatches from the South African Campaign” or “Herodotus’ History
of England”; and for his articulation of the literary principle that
effects influence causes, or: the impact of later works of literature upon
earlier ones. The prose is dry and acerbic, salted with classical tags and
allusions.
Lynne TILLMAN
“Madame Realism: A Fairy Tale” (1988), in This is Not It. Stories.
D.A.P.,
2002.
Gene WOLFE
“The Rubber Bend”(1974), in Storeys from the Old Hotel. Kerosina, 1988.
Pastiche of Sherlock Holmes and Nero Wolfe, with allusion to C.L. Dodgson, Alice in Wonderland, and Charles Peirce: “ ‘Do you mean to say,’ I exclaimed, ‘that your reading led you to the solution of this remarkable case?’ ”
Virginia WOOLF
“The Lives of the Obscure”, in The Common Reader, Harcourt, Brace
and World, 1953; “Dr. Burney’s Evening Party”, in The
Second Common Reader, Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1960; and various other
pieces in
The Death of the Moth, Granite
and Rainbow,
and The Captain’s Death Bed.
(Virtuoso
fictional
recreations that also discuss, drawing heavily upon literary sources.)
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