The Weak Novel

Catalog description

The “weak” novel has been with us for a long time. The weak novel is a novel that partly or wholly fails to be a novel, at all. This is the confessional novel, the documentary novel, the novel that includes material from other genres of writing and fields of knowledge, the non-narrative novel, the unoriginal novel, the novel that plays with its status as a material object or book. It is possible that no novel exists without its allegedly weak(er) cousins, and that no novel—no matter how big, strong, or novelistic—is without its moments of weakness. We will read such authors as Kathy Acker, Percival Everett, David Foster Wallace, Robert Glück, John Keene, and Eileen Myles and compose our own gloriously “weak” fictions.