Dear Incomprehension

“Dear Incomprehensionis well written, engaging, and provides a compelling (anti)framework for reading contemporary experimental fiction. It unfolds a delightfully performative provocation of the reading and speculative practices it proposes we attend more closely to, opening up timely inquiries into the objects of literary studies today.”
—Laura Shackelford, author of Tactics of the Human: Experimental Technics in American Fiction

“Dear Incomprehension is our new guide to critical failure. It is a thrilling experience of the nexus between contemporary American speculative fiction and poststructuralism—s realist and materialist aftereffects. Vanderhaeghe’s readings are smart, lively, perceptive, and often surprising. They turn the contradictions at the core of literary meaning, referential realism, and critical authority around in circles. The astonishing afflictions of speculation shine forth in a new light.”
—Zachary Tavlin, author of Glancing Visions: Surface and Depth in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
 

“Some of us might recall David Markson’s claim in 2001 that This Is Not a Novel. And now, Stéphane Vanderhaeghe has put together a long list of contrarian American fictions, including those by Shelley Jackson, Gary Lutz, Ben Marcus, Blake Butler, Jane Unrue, Mark Doten, and Lucy Corin. Themes in these works are tagged. Keywords and concepts are collected. And Vanderhaeghe takes us ‘a step or two outside’ the established categories of ‘experimental,’ ‘innovative,’ ‘difficult,’ and even ‘apocalyptic.’ What he offers instead is a refreshing, speculative turn in American literature’s lineage.”
—Joseph Tabbi, principle researcher at the Center for Digital Narrative at the University of Bergen in Norway