“Most of my fictions are based upon intentionally radical formal experiments: stories that are either the opening sentences of hypothetical stories that might follow or the closing sentences of hypothetical stories that might have come before or, more recently, single-sentence epiphanies of non-existent longer stories; stories composed entirely of numbers or entirely of line-drawings that metamorphose in narrative sequences that are sometimes, as in my ‘constructivist fictions,’ rigorously systemic.
Whereas the aim of these strategies has been the use of radically alternative materials for printed fiction, the other direction of my creative work is making literature in media other than printed pages—not adaptations in the slick sense but genuine intrinsic translations that exploit the singular capabilities of each alternative medium and yet preserve the integrity of the original literary text.
A final concern of my creative work has been the essential differences among short fictions, novellas, and novels and between poetry and fiction, even at the avant-garde edges, and this last difference is the overall theme of this book.”
— Richard Kostelanetz