Experimental Fiction

An anti-novel about the value of the unseen, unknown, and unwritten.

This piece consists entirely of first sentences from 268 short stories published in The New Yorker over the past 20 years, from 1997 to 2017.

“I love titles that sound good in the mouth.”

The pleasures of literary play in the writer’s final novel.

The writer on his short story collection, Hybrid Creatures, and using mathematical equations, HTML code, music symbols, and propositional logic to build narratives.

The great lost American fragment novel.

Writing as an intransitive catastrophe and the hyperbole of literature.

I was the type of man who got his ears cleaned. I was the type of woman who didn’t like dogs. We lived together in a house on a street that was the color of asphalt. I told you what I thought of you.

500 billion years ago—the dark touches itself in the dark and experiences something like ecstasy. Except that ecstasy isn’t a feeling yet—the sensation is just kind of sharp and warm. Afterwards, the dark feels happy and breathless. Afterwards, the dark feels lonely.

The Infinite Ground novelist on detective fiction, Borges, end times, and the impermanence of bodies.

The novelists on Vietnam, Norman Mailer, and the dragon’s perspective.