What Is Experimental Fiction?

What is experimental fiction?

Experimental fiction is fiction in which the form of the book is inseparable from its content. It refuses the assumption that novels must follow a fixed set of conventions (linear time, a central protagonist, a plot built on cause and effect) and it has been doing so for more than a century. The press publishes fiction that does not fit the categories the major commercial presses use to sort fiction by.

Here is how our editor, Eckhard Gerdes, has answered the question.

What is experimental fiction? I have always thought of experimental fiction as work that pushes formal boundaries. It considers the "norms" of fiction and asks why these so-called "norms" are essential anyway. Why plot? Why characterization? Why chapters? Why words at all?

Experimental fiction has been asking many such questions and challenging the assumptions that conventional fiction writers have held and preached for far too long. When the conventional ones announce that fiction must be written according to a limited set of rules, we are the ones to ask them why.

What is experimental fiction? That is a question I am asked often. I did respond to that question in some detail in an article called "Against Defining Experimental Fiction," which appeared in The Notre Dame Review. There I argued that the concept is much too large and too elusive to define easily. And to be honest, the reason for the argument baffles me. Why would anyone not be interested in what's ahead, what's new, what's different? Why should we limit ourselves to the tried-and-true?

I always say that a writer will know if they've done something significant if they can step back from it, look at it, and say with certainty that only they, of all people on this good Earth, could have written this particular piece. Then the writer will have contributed something to the sum total of human knowledge, and we can be grateful for that.

— Eckhard Gerdes, 2023

Forty years in

In 2026, after forty years of publishing experimental fiction, Gerdes wrote a longer answer.

The press is called The Journal of Experimental Fiction. People sometimes ask me, after forty years, what the second word means.

The honest answer is that I am not the right person to define it abstractly. I have never used the word "experimental" as a stand-alone position. It functions, in the press's name, the way "natural" functions in the name of a grocery store: it tells you what shelves we are stocking, not what philosophy we hold. We publish fiction that does not fit the categories the major commercial presses have set up to sort fiction by. That is what the name says, and that is what we do.

The reason there is a name for this kind of fiction at all is that the dominant form of the American novel hardened, in the second half of the twentieth century, around a particular set of expectations. The expectations are well known. Linear time. A central protagonist whose psychology the reader is invited to inhabit. A plot built on causal sequence. Sentences that disappear in service of the story. There is nothing wrong with any of these conventions; some of the books I have loved most operate inside all of them. There is only something wrong with the assumption that they are the only conventions a novel can be built from, and there has been something professionally wrong, for a long time, with the structural inability of the major American publishing industry to publish anything that is built from other conventions at any scale.

So a parallel publishing infrastructure built itself, slowly, over the second half of the century. The writers I came up reading were the writers this infrastructure made possible. Kenneth Patchen. Raymond Federman. Kathy Acker. Samuel Beckett. James Joyce. Virginia Woolf. Richard Brautigan. Arno Schmidt. Italo Calvino. These writers do not resemble each other. They have very little in common as stylists or as thinkers. What they have in common is that each of them, in a specific way, wrote books that the major commercial industry of their day did not know how to publish, and they wrote them anyway, and the books survived through the labor of small presses, small magazines, and individual readers passing copies hand to hand. That is the tradition I learned from, and it is the tradition JEF is downstream of, and it is the only tradition I have ever been interested in publishing into.

There are two adjacent positions JEF is not. We are not an academic postmodernism shelf. There are presses (good ones; I am not running them down) that publish what an English department in 1995 would have called "postmodern fiction," meaning fiction that quotes theory at the reader and tests itself against the formal taxonomies of a graduate seminar. That fiction has its own value and its own publishers. It is not what we are doing. We are not, either, a genre-experimental shelf, by which I mean the imprint that publishes formally adventurous science fiction or formally adventurous horror or formally adventurous mystery. That work has its own publishers too, and I have loved a great deal of it. JEF, though, is not running a genre proposition. We are running a literary one.

What the literary proposition comes down to, on any given submission day, is whether the book in front of me is the book the author had to write rather than the book the market was asking for. That is the only question I have ever had to answer about a manuscript. The Patchen Award is the institutionalized version of the question. The 98 numbered issues of the journal are the longitudinal answer. The 99 books in the catalog are the same answer, told one book at a time.

— Eckhard Gerdes, 2026

A short history of the form

Experimental fiction is older than the realist novel that later crowded it out. Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1759) already digressed, drew diagrams, blacked out a page, and refused to let its story proceed in a straight line. In the early twentieth century the modernists broke the sentence and the chronology open: James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939), Virginia Woolf's The Waves (1931), Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans (1925). Samuel Beckett pared narrative down to voice and silence across the trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable (1951–1953). In postwar France, the Oulipo — Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec, Italo Calvino — built fiction on formal constraint, most famously Perec's lipogrammatic novel La Disparition (1969). The American postmodernists carried the work forward: John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse (1968), Donald Barthelme's collage stories, Robert Coover's The Universal Baseball Association (1968). The Beats and their descendants — Kenneth Patchen, Richard Brautigan, William S. Burroughs — kept the small-press and hand-to-hand tradition alive alongside the university one. Kathy Acker and Raymond Federman pushed appropriation and typography into the 1970s and 1980s. JEF has been publishing into this tradition since 1986.

Techniques of experimental fiction

Experimental writers work with a recurring set of formal strategies. A single book often uses several at once.

  • Metafiction — fiction that acknowledges its own fictional status, as in James R. Hugunin's Finding Mememo. See What is metafiction?
  • Nonlinear narrative — stories that break chronological sequence, as in James R. Hugunin's Case X. See Nonlinear narrative.
  • Fragmented narrative — prose built from discontinuous pieces, as in James R. Hugunin's Elder Physics. See Fragmented narrative.
  • Constraint-based writing (Oulipo) — fiction written under a formal rule, such as a lipogram (a text that omits a letter) or the prisoner's constraint.
  • Collage and appropriation — prose built from found text, news, advertising, and clinical transcription, as in Harold Jaffe's Porn-Anti-Porn.
  • Autofiction — fiction that uses the author's real life as raw material without claiming to be memoir.

Read experimental fiction

Gerdes ends his 2026 answer by saying that a reader who has come this far already knows whether this is the right press for them. If that is you, there are three places to start. Browse the whole catalog to see forty years of experimental fiction in one place. Read a Kenneth Patchen Award winner to see what the press honors as the best of the form. Or, if you write it yourself, submit your own novel for the Award.

Frequently asked questions

What is experimental fiction?

Experimental fiction is fiction in which the form of the book is inseparable from its content. It pushes formal boundaries and questions the conventions (plot, characterization, linear time, chapters) that conventional fiction treats as fixed rules.

Who are the major experimental fiction writers?

The tradition includes Kenneth Patchen, Raymond Federman, Kathy Acker, Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Richard Brautigan, among many others. The Journal of Experimental Fiction publishes contemporary experimental writers working in the same tradition.

What is the Kenneth Patchen Award?

The Kenneth Patchen Award is JEF's annual prize for the most innovative novel of the year. Learn more at the Kenneth Patchen Award page.

Where can I buy experimental fiction?

You can buy experimental fiction directly from The Journal of Experimental Fiction at experimentalfiction.com. Browse the full catalog at experimentalfiction.com/collections/all.

How do I submit experimental fiction for publication?

The primary route is the Kenneth Patchen Award; see the Award page for entry details. General submissions are considered through the same page.