The Dialogue Within

The Dialogue Within is a JEF general-issue anthology of experimental and innovative fiction, gathering thirty-five writers under one cover.

JEF has been running anthologies of this kind for forty years. Belighted Fiction (JEF #4), A-Way with It!, the numbered issues #35, #39, #50, Offbeat/Quirky, Polyphony (#98), and the single-author Festschrifts for Raymond Federman, John Barth, and Harold Jaffe are the lineage. The model came from Federman, who suggested an entire issue be devoted to his own work and inadvertently launched what became the press's signature editorial form.

The contributors read as a transit map of innovative fiction in present tense: writers based across the United States, France, Iran, Australia, and elsewhere; established voices, David Moscovich, Charles Lowe, Doug Rice, John Kinsella among them, alongside first-anthology bylines. The anthology is what the press's working list looks like in the year of its appearance.