Minimal Fictions

Concrete Fiction. Offered here for the first time in book form are important selections from Richard Kostelanetz's esteemed experimental texts. Minimal Fictions encompasses some 400 stories which, taken together, form a fictional world that is as visually surprising as it is verbally resonant. It should be emphasized that there is a clear difference between the minimalism practiced by Carver and Barthelme and the truly radical minimalism--analogous to that devised by musicians and painters in the 1960's--of someone like Richard Kostelanetz, who since 1970 has produced a number of highly original fictions in the forms of lines, numbers, one-, two-, and three-word sequences, and other severely attenuated elements. (Larry McCaffery).