Review of Contemporary Fiction (Spring 1996): The Future of Fiction, A Forum Edited by David Foster Wallace

The Review's aesthetic focus has been called many things postmodern, experimental, avant-garde, metafictional, subversive but in bringing this aesthetic to a wider audience it also seeks to expose the artificial barriers that exist between and within cultures. To this end, The Review has a special affinity for the works of foreign writers who may otherwise go unread in the United States, as well as American writers whose work has gone unchampioned in their own country. An extensive book review section also covers recent works of innovative writing. Above all, The Review of Contemporary Fiction attempts to expand readers' notions of what fiction is and what it can do.ToCDavid Foster Wallace, “Quo Vadis—Introduction”Sven Birkerts, “Second Thoughts”Melvin Jules Bukiet, “Crackpot Realism: Fiction for the Forthcoming Millennium”Mary Caponegro, “Impressions of a Paranoid Optimist”Peter Dimock, “Literature as Lyrical Politics”Jonathan Franzen, “I’ll Be Doing More of Same”Janice Galloway, “Bad Times”Gerald Howard, “Slouching towards Grubnet: The Author in the Age of Publicity”Carole Maso, “Rupture, Verge, and Precipice/Precipice, Verge, and Hurt Not”Bradford Morrow, “Rivages Roses for Niels Bohr”John O’Brien, “31 Questions and Statements about the Future of Literary Publishing, Bookstores, Writers, Readers, and Other Matters”Christopher Sorrentino, “Specially Marked Packages”Steve Tomasula, “Three Axioms for Projecting a Line (or Why It Will Continue to Be Hard to Write a Title sans Slashes or Parentheses)”William T. Vollmann, “SYSOUT=A”Curtis White, “Writing the Life Postmodern”Focus on MexicoRikki Ducornet, “On Returning from Chiapas: A Revery in Many Voices”