Contents:
Against Mimesis: Fiction About Fiction
• "Life-Story" by John Barth
• "The Seventh Trunk" by Heinrich Böll
• "How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House of Correction and Began My Life Over Again" by Joyce Carol Oates
• "The Coal Shoveller" by Keith Fort
Against "Reality": The Uses of Fantasy
• "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote" by Jorge Luis Borges
• "Gogol’s Wife" by Tommaso Landolfi
• "Rhinoceros" by Eugène Ionesco
• "A World Ends" by Wolfgang Hildesheimer
Against Event: The Primacy of Voice
• "Last Class" by Theodore Roethke
• "You Can’t Cover Up the Sky With Your Hand" by Oscar Lewis
• "Motherlogue" by Ann Quin
• "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country" by William Gass
Against Subject: Fiction in Search of Something to Be About
• "Blow-Up" by Julio Cortázar
• "A View from the Sky" by Curtis Zahn
• "The Squirrel Cage" by Thomas M. Disch
Against the Middle Range of Experience: New Forms of Extremity
• "The Pukey" by Nigel Dennis
• "The Locust Cry" by Norman Mailer
• "In a Hole" by George P. Elliott
• "A Pedestrian Accident" by Robert Coover
Against Analysis: The Phenomenal World
• "Tropism XV" by Nathalie Sarraute
• "In the Corridors of the Underground: The Escalator" by Alain Robbe-Grillet
• "Welcome to Utah" by Michel Butor
Against Meaning: Forms of the Absurd
• "The Man in Pyjamas" by Eugenio Montale
• "The Self-Contained Compartment" by Michael Goldstein
• "Game" by Donald Barthelme
• "A Mean Teacher" by Mitchell Sisskind
Against Scale: The Minimal Story
• "Games" by Reinhard Lettau
• "Father, Father, What Have You Done?" by Russell Edson
• "Taboo" by Enrique Anderson Imbert