Christian Lorentzen
“Welcome to the Party”
Christian Lorentzen
The vogue in the 2010s for “autofiction” was a result of certain ongoing and waning trends that led to a conjuncture: 1. The memoir, once the province either of celebrities or writers at the end of the line, had risen in prominence as a commercial form. This led to a market opening for a similar genre that called itself fiction and that was less reliant on tropes of confession and...
“Here Comes the Break” | On Literary Fiction Today
Christian Lorentzen
As we were preparing to launch this magazine, we told our first cohort of writers not to pitch us anything about contemporary fiction. We were bored by it, we said — mostly but not entirely tongue-in-cheek. This issue, we’re making an exception. It seems to us that the literary ground has shifted, and the forms and themes considered most exciting just a few years ago are now all but exhausted....
