About the press.
Forty years of innovative fiction, one editor, one imprint.
The press.
Founded in 1986 by editor Eckhard Gerdes, JEF (The Journal of Experimental Fiction) is a small American press dedicated to innovative fiction in long form.
We publish in numbered editions of the Journal and as standalone books that do not look like other books. The catalogue is the work; the work is for readers.
Forty years on the page
At least two books a year since 1986. Three marks. Almost one hundred titles.
The press's logo has changed three times. The catalogue is what's behind each one.
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1986
Projections
1986
A novella that sets aside conventional time, space, and causality to trace rivers, music, light-projections, and memories that did and did not happen.
- 2001
Belighted Fiction
2001
Fourth issue of the Journal: fiction made light, in the line that runs from Sterne and Stein through Brautigan, Calvino, and Acker.
- 2002
The Laugh that Laughs at the Laugh: Writing from and about the Pen Man, Raymond Federman: Journal of Experimental Fiction 23
2002
The volume that invented JEF's signature festschrift form: unpublished Federman fiction alongside criticism and homage from more than thirty-five of the writers closest to him.
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- 2012
How to Break Article Noun
2012
The first Patchen Award winner of the revived prize: seven parts of seven chapters interleaved with photographs, physics formulas, botanical Latin, and poetry, the form documenting a breakup as precisely as anything in it.
- 2015
Tangled in Motion
2015
Jane L. Carman's 'fiction + truth + p(r)o(s)etry': a hybrid of running text, prose-poetry, and lyric memoir built around love, abandonment, and the restorying of a girl living in the margins of an already marginalized society.
- 2016
Afterimage: Critical Essays on Photography
2016
James R. Hugunin's essays on photography from the journal Afterimage between 1977 and 1988, gathered as JEF #70, the second of three JEF volumes that consolidate his thirty-year career as a photography critic.
- 2016
Goosestep
2016
Late-career docufiction from Harold Jaffe: news reports, court records, and documentary source material treated with the minimal, pointed intervention he wrote thirty books in across four decades.
- 2017
Offbeat/Quirky
2017
JEF #73, the first book of the Offbeat/Quirky Books imprint: forty-six contemporary writers gathered around the title's premise, off the realist grid by temperament rather than program.
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- 2022
The Chronicles of Michel du Jabot
2022
Eckhard Gerdes's largest book to date: a 733-page novel of a Frenchman in quest of an absent father, what Tarnawsky in the introduction called a 733-page exhalation.
- 2024
Sebastian in a Dream
2024
Tarnawsky's late-period novel structured on Bach's Goldberg Variations: thirty variations bracketed by an aria, the narrator a semi-comatose man waiting for a son who may or may not arrive.
- 2026
Red Girl Jumping: an experimental memoir written by memory
2026
A fable-like memoir narrated by Red Girl, a shard of memory split off from Kimberly to protect her from a childhood secret, who must now write the way back into one self.
The editor.
Eckhard Gerdes founded JEF in 1986 and has edited every title since. He is also a novelist whose work is part of the JEF catalogue.
Distribution & shipping.
We hold our inventory in Illinois and ship every order ourselves, directly from the press. No middleman, no warehouse network: the editor packs and mails each order.
A handful of titles are reprinted when stock runs low. Others go out of print after their first run. The catalogue here is what's currently available.
See our shipping policy for delivery times, rates, and international service.
Contact.
- Phone (815) 761-2223
- Email egerdes@experimentalfiction.com
- Mail Evanston, IL