This book contains two books by Richard Kostelanetz: FICT/IONS and THIS SENTENCE. Each starts on a different side and is upside down from the other. The back cover becomes a rotated front cover and vice versa. Thus, this book has a double paratext with two covers, two half-titles, two imprints and two dedications (to Anton Chekhov and Northrop Frye). However, the double-front cover layout is disrupted by Lulu’s barcode, which is always printed on last page and back cover, forcing a standard orientation back onto the book.

In between these two texts, in the middle of the book, is the short essay “New Retrospective on my Fictions: Forty Notes.” Note 34 of the essay explains the idea of FICT/IONS, “that depend upon discovering within a single word two shorter words that, concluding with a period, make a narrative.” Accordingly, the first part of the book contains a list of words that, as in “Alter/natives,” “Cap/a/city,” or “I/nun/dating,” are broken up by one or more forward slashes into syllables or words of different meaning, creating multi-semantic mini-narratives: “the splitting of fictions emphasizes division as a paradoxical form of construction, as well as the particulate quality of syllabic ‘matter’” (Thomas Fink, review). THIS SENTENCE is a collection of statements on sentences, with each sentence referencing itself.

In his essay in the middle of the book, the complaint comes through that, although Kostelanetz has authored several publications, and although he has been appreciated as an avant-gardist and radical formalist in the great encyclopedias of this world, he has nevertheless experienced too little institutional and publishing support: “there have been few reviews of individual books, no commercial contracts, no grants for fiction writing, [...] little public acknowledgment of my alternative purposes in creating and publishing fiction.” Having long been active in alternative literary publishing himself (publishing in small magazines, self-publishing, co-founding Assembling Press in 1970, founding Future Press in 1977 and Archae Editions in 1978), Kostelanetz now has two of his previously unpublished works being released as a single print-on-demand book by Raymond Farr’s Blue & Yellow Dog Press.