Bending Genre

Reviews / Votes

Bending Genre is an exciting anthology of contemporary nonfiction that shifts the focus from ethical questions about "truthtelling" to aesthetic questions about form. The contributors make up a who's-who of distinguished and new writers who have been enlivening the conversation about formal range in nonfiction for the past decade. What happens when writers "push the line," the editors ask, in terms of what defines genre? Oddball and exploratory, reflective and transgressive, musical and mindful, these essays brilliantly lay out the trail. -- Alison Hawthorne Deming, Professor and Director of Creative Writing Program, University of Arizona, US What a wonderful and needed anthology! The essay has always created itself by doing battle with its adjectives: formal, informal, personal, genteel, modern(ist). Now, just as we were getting comfortable-too comfortable-with lyrical, this anthology arrives to unsettle us again with a slew of new adjectives: queer, bent, bending, monstrous, hybrid, impertinent, fluid, transgressive, anarchic, faked, diabolic, mis-shelved, Dionysian, blissful, puzzling, vertiginous, saturated, unboxed. And then, when our heads are beginning to explode with the centrifugal force of these adjectives, Bending Genre pulls us back with an equally wondrous and innovative set of formal possibilities - creative nonfiction as video game, false document, encyclopedia, autogeography, murder mystery, sepia-tone picture, Play-Doh construction, train trip, user of white space, questionnaire, or the genre that dare not speak its name. I will adopt this book for my classes. It's time to shake things up. -- Ned Stuckey-French, Director, Program in Publishing & Editing, Florida State University, USA, and Book Review Editor for Fourth Genre Opens up via several essays by some of the best current practitioners and theorists of the essay-writing craft...The essays of Part II, 'Structures', offer numerous examples and ideas of shaping organizational frameworks for the essay...an excellent job discussing the uses of story, elements,montage, white spaces, lack of closure, etymology, and metaphor...I would recommend this collection to all serious writers. -- Heidi Czerwiec * Rain Taxi * A wonderfully queer enterprise. Collectively, it is not entirely criticism; not entirely creative writing. Singer and Walker collate the essays to destabilize the reader's assumptions and expectations of the text--and they do so successfully...Perplexing and intellectually stimulating, Bending Genre and all the questions it raises continues the discussion outside of the text. What is particularly noteworthy of Singer and Walker is that their project--much in vein of "queer" and of the notion that writing, like critical thinking, is interminable--remains alive online. They have harnessed the powers of new media to keep the discussion going, both on Facebook as well as the project's website. -- Marcie Bianco * LambdaLiterary.org *