Offbeat/Quirky

Offbeat/Quirky is the seventy-third issue of the Journal of Experimental Fiction and the first book of the Offbeat/Quirky Books imprint, a thematic anthology edited by Eckhard Gerdes. Forty-six contemporary voices gather under the theme that names the volume: writers off the realist grid by temperament rather than program.

The roster runs from Alec S. Scott and Arnold Skemer through Carolyn Chun, Denis Emorine, Jane L. Carman, Jim Meirose, Norman Conquest, Thaddeus Rutkowski, and Peter Wortsman, ordered, as Gerdes notes in the introduction, "in quite Midwestern fashion, in the order of their first names."

It is the fifty-seventh book the press has published counting the three proto-JEF titles before the Journal of Experimental Fiction name was adopted in 2001 (the JEF series numbering reserves some slots, so the issue count runs ahead of the physical book count). Gerdes uses the introduction to mark a shift in posture. The name Journal of Experimental Fiction, he writes, is accurate but "perhaps a trifle academic"; he does not want readers to take the press as "part of an insular community that only feeds off of academe." The new imprint name carries a wider mandate. Daniel Borzutzky, later a National Book Award winner for poetry, first appeared in JEF's pages in Belighted Fiction alongside the story writer Amina Memory Cain.

Gerdes's measure of the work, repeated in his introduction: "the measure of great work is if the creator can look at the work when it is complete and say to herself or himself, 'Only I, of all people on the face of this planet, could have written this work.'"