Biting the Error
Writers Explore Narrative
Anthology of theoretical writings on New Narrative, a movement that originated in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1970s. New Narrative reconceives autobiographical writing through genre crossing and intersectional storytelling.
Co-edited with Robert Glück, Camille Roy, and Gail Scott.
Coach House Books, 2004
About
What is the best way to tell a story?
In this anthology, the first-ever collection of essays by innovative, cutting-edge writers on the theme of narration, forty of the continent's top experimental writers describe their engagement with language, storytelling and the world. The anthology includes renowned writers like Kathy Acker, Dennis Cooper, Nicole Brossard, Daphne Marlatt, Lydia Davis and Kevin Killian, writers who have spent years pondering the meaning of storytelling and how storytelling functions in our culture, as well as presenting a new generation of brilliant thinkers and writers, like Christian Bök, Corey Frost, Derek McCormack and Lisa Robertson.
Contemporizing the friendly anecdotal style of Montaigne and written by daring writers of different ages, of different origins, from many different regions of the continent, from Mexico to Montreal, these essays run the gamut of mirth, prose poetry, tall tales and playful explorations of reader/writer dynamics. They discuss aesthetics founded on new explorations in the field of narrative, the mystery that is the body, questions of how representation may be torqued to deal with gender and sexuality, the experience of marginalized people, the negotiation between different orders of time, the 'performance' of outlaw subject matter.
Brave, energetic and fresh, Biting the Error tells a whole new story about narrative.
Praise
“No other book has ever so completely noted the instability of the line between fiction and poetry. In a time when markers of genre are once again being retrofitted to last another millennium, to cater to the market, we applaud this simple, comprehensive demonstration.”
—Kevin Killian, for the Board of Directors, Small Press Traffic Literary Arts Center
Contributors
With writing from Kathy Acker, D. L. Alvarez, Betsy Andrews, Dodie Bellamy, Christian Bök, Bruce Boone, Taylor Brady, Lawrence Ytzhak Braithwaite, Nicole Brossard, Mary Burger, Lydia Davis, Jeff Derksen, Aja Couchois Duncan, Michael du Plessis, kari edwards, Corey Frost, Renee Gladman, Robert Glück, Rob Halpern, Carla Harryman, Laird Hunt, Kevin Killian, Chris Kraus, Pamela Lu, Nicole Markotic, Daphne Marlatt, Douglas A. Martin, Steve McCaffery, Derek McCormack, Robin Tremblay-McGaw, Laura Moriarty, Eileen Myles, Doug Rice, Lisa Robertson, Camille Roy, Leslie Scalapino, Kathy Lou Schultz, Gail Scott, X. I. Selene, Aaron Shurin, Nathalie Stephens, Anne Stone, Lynne Tillman, Paul VanDeCarr, heriberto yepez, Magdalena Zurawski.
Biting the Error is edited by Mary Burger, Robert Glück, Camille Roy and Gail Scott, the co-founders of the Narrativity Website Magazine, based at the Poetry Center, San Francisco State University.
Excerpt
from the
Editor’s Introduction
by Mary Burger
When I got there (eventually, to San Francisco), I found there were other writers who, like me, were at that time calling ourselves poets but doing a kind of writing that often looked like prose, and talking a lot about narrative.
Narrative meant that you could be a person having experiences and you could admit and afirm in writing that you, the writer, had experiences and thought about them and the meaning of them; that personhood itself, if a fiction, was no less useful for not being “true”; that in fact its very artifice made it a fruitful literary conceit; and that all this—the being, the experiencing, the thinking, the meaning, the artifice—could be the stuff of your work.