Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative Writing 1977-1997

by Dodie Bellamy (Editor), Kevin Killian (Editor)

In the twenty years that followed America's bicentennial, narrative writing was re-formed, reflecting new political and sexual realities. With the publication of this anthology, the New Narrative era bounds back to life, ripe with dramatic propulsion and infused with the twin strains of poetry and Continental theory. Arranged chronologically, the reader will discover classic texts of New Narrative from Bob Gluck to Kathy Acker, and rare materials including period interviews, reviews, essays, and talks combined to form a new map of late twentieth-century creative rebellion.

Genres: Fiction, Poetry, Queer, Literature, Essays, Anthologies, LGBT

512 pages, Paperback

First published July 3, 2017

About the author

Dodie Bellamy is an American novelist, nonfiction author, journalist and editor. Her work is frequently associated with that of Dennis Cooper, Kathy Acker, and Eileen Myles. She is one of the originators in the New Narrative literary movement, which attempts to use the tools of experimental fiction and critical theory and apply them to narrative storytelling.

She ist married to Kevin Killian.

Reviews

[Delia Rainey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everyone in this book seems to know each other, write to each other, and think about each other’s writing, and in this way it’s an anthology about community. I can’t begin to describe how healing it is to read this all while dealing with mass death in 2020’s global pandemic, dealing with a sick parent, dealing with isolation and my own perverted heart. I’ve also been grappling a lot with my generation’s dichotomy of “cringe” ppl vs. “cool” ppl, of “good” vs. “bad” politics, of sarcastic trolling vs. fake instagram purity. New Narrative is sincere because it’s bad and good, cringe and cool, gossipy and pure, gross and dirty and lumpy and telling everything. There is nothing more real to me than the collaging of S&M sex, anti-capitalist ideas, random walks down the street, random childhood memories, AIDS destruction and ongoingness of death, hence an accumulation of caretakers, obsession with pop culture and obsession with love. It took me a really long to read this, to savor it. By spending so much time with so many different authors, many who I had never known, I could really investigate these painful or wonderful or neutral experiences, and it just kept going and going. There are no answers, there is no perfect formula to achieve. The anthology is like that for me; an ongoing experience where anything is possible. So many people in the anthology are dead, and died because of cancer or AIDS or illness or poverty or suicide, but their words and ideas keep going and going forever. That’s the purpose of literature, of art: so we keep living.

R.I.P. Kevin Killian, I’m so grateful for your writing and passionate spirit. R.I.P. Marsha Campbell, whose piece “Wearing a Tough Jacket” made me feel the most intimate intensity of emotions, I wish you were still here to know.

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

My review is now up at 4Columns.
http://www.4columns.org/milks-m/write...

Here's an excerpt:

Was it Chris Kraus’s Aliens & Anorexia or Dodie Bellamy’s The Letters of Mina Harker? Maybe Great Expectations by Kathy Acker. I can’t say for sure which was my first encounter with New Narrative, but I remember the thrum of exhilaration I got from it. I was twenty-five, studying fiction at Temple. Acker, Kraus, Bellamy—and later discoveries like Laurie Weeks, Kevin Killian, Lynne Tillman: whatever I thought I knew about writing, these writers challenged all of it. I didn’t quite grasp exactly what I’d read—fiction? memoir? theory?—but I came away reeling and raving, and itching to write.

In their new anthology, Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative 1977–1997, editors Bellamy and Killian gather what they consider the first generation of New Narrative writing—though in keeping with the movement’s suspicion of linear, coherent narratives, they are quick to shrug at this marker. Formed in the late 1970s in San Francisco, New Narrative was a transgressive, queer-leaning, self- and body-obsessed literary avant-garde that took shape in part against the dominance of anti-narrative, self-evacuating Language poetry at the time. Combining the confessional with the conceptual, it experimented with the possibilities of loosely autobiographical storytelling to produce an exploded and unstable “I.” Gossipy and uninhibited, its breath is hot in your ear. It wants to tell you everything, and it wants you to overshare back.

[Tom Buchanan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Someone should sneak copies of this onto the syllabus at all of Google's SF campuses.

[Nia Holton-Raphael · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 — there were some pieces I loved and some pieces that made me roll my eyes a million times over. first time reading an anthology and i loved becoming enmeshed in a moment/movement through the perspective of so many different writers.

favorites: Five Year Plan - David O. Steinberg, Nothing Ever Just Disappears - Sam D’Alessandro, Prince of the Damned - Scott Watson, Sue - Cecilia Dougherty, and obvi Chelsea Girls - Eileen Myles <3

[Tommy Menace · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall this is a fantastic, engaging collection of short stories, essays, and interviews from authors who at one point were at the cutting edge of writing. You can feel their hunger and excitement about this new terrain they were forging. I will say a decent amount of it is fairly obscene, some of it rules tho.
Didn't know I would learn so much about the scholarship regarding gay pornography, but here we are?

[Andrew Bishop · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great introduction and a very unexpected trove of surprises since I came to it mainly thru loving Dodie Bellamy's books. It was also good to read work by people I first heard about in The Letters of Mina Harker.