This anthology was recommended to me by my thesis supervisor as an example of fictocriticism. Fictocriticism appears to be a blend of academic essay, personal stories and the purely fictional. The exact proportion of these varies from piece to piece. As one of the contributors to this anthology puts it ”...working on a piece of fictocriticism, a term I’m rapidly becoming more and more critical of, if not fictional about, largely because if you asked me what it meant I’m not at all sure I could tell you anything.”

This anthology was, as anthologies tend to be, extremely uneven. There were some gems here, but I found them too few and far between. Perhaps this is because I generally dislike experimental writing. Unpunctuated and run-on sentences irritate me no end, as does excessive messing about with narrative structure. I like what I read to make sense to me, and a few of these pieces lost me completely. There were times I found myself staring at the page with absolutely no notion of what was being said.

I finished this book out of sheer stubborness.