Metafictions

Calvino's stories stand on their own as finished performances, as distinctive and seductive in their own way as the more spectacular 'metafictions' that followed them. ❋ Towers, Robert (1984)

Yet as fabulously PoMo as were the metafictions upon which Barth has made his reputation (from 1960s The Sot-Weed Factor onward), neither his most recent Every Third Thought (Counterpoint, $24) or 2008's The Development (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $23) could even exist had he not first lived the life each are in many ways based upon. ❋ John Hood (2012)

I'm not overly fond of ponderously long historical novels either, but lean toward the more literary, abstruse and pretty metafictions written by brilliant young MFAs from Bryn Mawr. ❋ James Lloyd Davis (2011)

It's tempting to think of Borges as one of the conceptual inventors of hypertext, since his metafictions are so rich with allusion and linkage; even when he has invented a source or reference. ❋ Frank Wilson (2007)

Such minimalist flourishes are not what one would expect from the former creator of gargantuan metafictions. ❋ Unknown (2004)

Having spent the past two weeks in what I might call a spiritual communion with these authors, I can assure you that these texts are not the psychotic, fact-challenged rants of the mad, but carefully crafted metafictions in which the mundane terrors of cultural dislocation are recast as riveting epics of paranoia. ❋ Steve Almond (2009)

The book is a metafiction with none of the wit and panache of metafictions by Italo Calvino or Paul Auster in which a 60-year-old novelist named Thomas is writing a metafiction about another Thomas who receives a severed head (seemingly his own-a bad surrealist dream) in a box with a quotation from Frantz Fanon ❋ Unknown (2008)

“A Life in Fictions” by Kat Howard is the next in the list of metafictions, but it’s an interesting twist. ❋ Unknown (2010)

Yes, how terrifying that Chris, who is known to love weird historical pranks and messed-up literary metafictions, would be targeted by a doppelganger who writes a novel about a doppelganger, in Chris’s style, with blurbs by many of Chris’s admirers …. it is positively spooky. ❋ Unknown (2008)