The novelist and critic Christine Brooke-Rose reflects on her own fictional craft and turns her well-developed analytic abilities on other writers fictional and critical, from Hawthorne and Pound to Bloom and Derrida, in an attempt to investigate those difficult border zones between the "invented" and the "real." The result is an extended meditation, in a highly personal idiom, on the creative act and its relation to modern theoretical writing and thinking. Like her fiction, Professor Brooke-Rose's criticism is self-consciously experimental, trying out and discarding ideas, adopting others....

In her latest novel, Textermination, the eminent British novelist/critic Christine Brooke-Rose pulls a wide array of characters out of the great works of literature and drops them into the middle of the San Francisco Hilton. Emma Bovary, Emma Woodhouse, Captain Ahab, Odysseus, Huck Finn... all are gathered for the Annual Convention of Prayer for Being, to meet, to discuss, to pray for their continued existence in the mind of the modern reader. But what begins as a grand enterprise erupts into total pandemonium: with characters from different times, places, and genres all battling for respect...

First published in 1970, this collection of eleven stories showcases Brooke-Roses innovative credentials at their zenith. The Foot and the The Religious Button deploy to stunning effect her unique evolution of the run-on first person camera-eye narrative style as pioneered by Robbe-Grillet in the nouveau roman movement; Small Loser and Medium Winner is a multilingual mix of allusions and discourses in the style of her 1968 novel Between; while Troglodyte and The Chinese Bedspread offer a more straightforward comic and realist approach. Go When You See the Green Man Walking is a dark,...