Richard Kostelanetz

Richard Kostelanetz

P.O. Box 444, Prince Street

New York, NY  10012-0008

New Retrospective on Fiction Writing (1968‑98)

(May be illustrated with visual, verbal, or visual‑verbal examples)

In the three decades that I've been publishing fiction, I have produced:

1) a novella with no more than two words to a paragraph (and then, in one published form, no more than

     two words to a book page)‑-One Night Stood (1978),

2) stories in the shape of syntactically continuous loops that lack beginnings or ends ("Infinities," 1998),

3) a book of scrupulously Minimal Fictions (1993) that are no more than three words in length, most having

     only two words or one prior to the period (a. k. a.full stop) that necessarily concludes the narrative action,

4) stories that develop through a series of shapes that are composed exclusively of letters or words ("Football

     Forms," 1968; Come Here, 1975, respectively),

5) fictions consisting exclusively of words whose meaning changes with the introduction not of other words

     but of different configurations of the initial words or nonverbal imagery ("Obliterate," 1974),

6) stories composed entirely of non representational line-drawings that metamorphose so systemically that

     each image in the sequence belongs only to its particular place (Constructivist Fictions, 1974‑1991;

     March, 1990),

7) individual sentences that are either the openings or the closings of otherwise unwritten stories (Openings &                            

     Closings, 1975),

8) stories composed of just cut-up photographs whose chips move symmetrically through narrative cycles

     (“Recall,” 1982),

9) separate modular fictions of photographs that can be read in any order (Reincarnations), of line-drawings

     whose positions in a sequence are interchangeable (and thus can be shuffled) (And So Forth, 1979), of

     sentences that are reordered in systemic ways to produce different emphases of the same words and gestures

     (Foreshortenings & Other Stories, 1978), if not radically different stories,

10) circular stories that flow from point to point but lack beginnings or ends (in More Short Fictions, 1980),

11) stories composed entirely of words that rhyme with one another—some two words long, others three, most

     even more populous (“Rhyming,” c.1990),

12) narratives, some only a page in length but one as long as a book, composed exclusively of numerals

     (Exhaustive Parallel Intervals, 1979),

13) a fiction composed of sixteen different typefaces and on audiotape told in sixteen purposefully different

     amplifications of a single voice (“Seductions,” 1980, 1981),

14) over two thousand single-sentence fictions representing the epiphanies of over two thousand otherwise

     unwritten stories (“Epiphanies,” since 1979),

15) manuscripts of single-sentence stories that are 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),

16) 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),

17) fiction books published in formats ranging from conventional spine‑bound volumes to such alternatives as   

     tabloid-sized newsprint books (Numbers: Poets & Stories, 1976), and accordion books that are opened to be   

     four inches high and several feet long (Extrapolate, Modulations, both 1975),

18) one film and a separate whose imagery is nothing other than words telling stories (Openings & Closings,

     1976‑78; Video Stories, forthcoming),

19) a film with symmetrical abstract fidions (described in #5 above) that meta­-morphose in systemic sequence

     (Constructivist Fictions, 1976‑77),

20) fictions that exist primarily on audiotape—that cannot be performed live, whose printed versions are no    

     more than scores for their realizations ( Ululation‑An Acoustic Fiction, 1992),

21) books in which abstract sequences are presented both in toto and intermixed with other sequences,

     thereby creating a metastory composed of many individual stories (Intermix, 1991),

22) "skeletal fiction" with horizontal sequences of words, separated by more hor­izontal space than is customary,

     without blatant syntactical connectives (but narrative implications nonetheless) (c. 1988),

23) paragraph‑long narratives whose successive sentences either add a word to or subtract a word from their

     imrnediate predecessor ("Plus/Minus,” 1980),

24) 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," "Recircuits", c. 1990),

25) translations, initially into Chinese‑, of single‑word fictions that are published on the same page as the 

     English original,

26) a linear narrative whose single‑spacee paragraphs are no more than two words in length ("Milestones in a

     Life," 1970),

27) a fiction solely in the form of a family tree ("On Fortune and Fate," 1969),

28) two books of "conceptual" fictions 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 page of words that

     establish a context for what follows (1978), "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 two opening letters of its successor or at its beginning at least

     the concluding two letters of its predecessor,

29) a cycle of one hundred and twenty‑seven erotic stories, each successively one word longer than its

     immediate predecessor until, at sixty‑four words in length, each new story become one word shorter than its

     immediate predecessor ("More or Less" c. 1980),

30) a four‑hour film composed of verbal and visual epiphanies that have no con­nection to one another, either

     vertically or horizontally, other than com­mon fictional structure (1981‑93),

31) videotapes whose abstract visual syntheses become an accompanying coun­terpoint to the more concrete

     audio narration (SeductionslRelationships, 1987),

32) probably a few other departures whose character cannot yet, for better of worse, be neatly encapsulated

     (????),

33) the purest oeuvre of fiction, as fiction, uncompromised by vulgar considera­tions, that anyone has ever done,

34) no conventional fiction—absolutely none—which  is to say nothing that could pass a university

     course/workshop in "fiction writing" (and get me a job teaching such), and no familiar milestone(s) from  

     which simple‑mind­ed critics could then smugly measure my "departure."

Even though these fictions of mine have appeared in scores of literary magazines, and over a dozen volumes

of these fictions have appeared in print (and my critical essays and manifestoes were collected as The Old Fictions and the New), while entries on me featuring my fiction appear in both the Merriam Webster

Encyclopedia of Literature (1995) and A Reader's Guide to 20th Century Fiction (Oxford, 1995), there have been few reviews of individual books, no grants for fic­tion writing, only two passing mentions in purportedly comprehensive surveys of contemporary fiction, little critical acknowledgement of my radically alternative

purposes in creating and publishing fiction; only one story was ever anthologized by someone else (Eugene Wildman, in his Experiments in Prose [1969]) though my poems are often anthologized.

Does anyone care? Should anyone care (other than me)? (Should I care? If so, how? Should I have written this?) What should be made of the fact that no one else‑absolutely no one else visible to us‑is making fiction in these ways?