Biting the Error

Book excerpt: 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 Bšk, 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. Biting the Error is edited by Mary Burger, Robert GlŸck, Camille Roy and Gail Scott, the co-founders of the Narrativity Website Magazine, based at the Poetry Center, San Francisco State University.