The Anthology of Babel: Papers on Non-Existent Texts
Borges once cheekily wrote, “Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness…A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer …a commentary.” Indeed authors as varied as Borges, Lovecraft, Dick, Apollinaire, Lew, and Asimov placed completely fictional books at the center of their own literary universes. That would make a fascinating subject for an anthology, but that is not this anthology. Rather, what this collection seeks are academic-style works of literary theory and criticism which take as their primary texts completely fictional novels, stories, movements, authors, and films.