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 to 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. Her linguistic prowess, her uncommon role as a recognised writer of fiction and theory and the relevance of her work to the feminist and other other movements, all contribute to the interest of this unusual sequence of essays.

A festschrift, as defined by Merriam-Webster online, is "a volume of writings by different authors presented as a tribute or memorial especially to a scholar." The writer feted in the Verbivoracious flagship festschrift was a scholar who also happened to be one of the most innovative writers of the 20th century (and certainly for the first decade of the 21st century). This collection contains essays, homages, and stories inspired by the work of Christine Brooke-Rose, arranged in the publication order of her books, commencing with the poem Gold (reprinted for the first time here), and concluding with Life, End of. The writers featured are an eclectic mix1 of critics, storytellers, ardent readers, academics, pasticheurs, homageurs, and people coerced to read the works of Christine Brooke-Rose for the sole purpose of contributing to this festschrift. Those not yet acquainted with her work should find sufficient entry points to her varying, often complex, sometimes cryptic, always playful, methods. Unswerving converts to her constraints will find many rapturous moments in the numerous flawlessly executed fictions included.

"The Brooke-Rose Omnibus" brings together four unexpected novels: "Out", a science-fiction vision of a world surviving catastrophe; "Such", in which a three-minute heart massage is developed into a poetic and funny narrative; "Between", a glittering experience of the multiplicity of language; and "Thru", a novel in which text and typography assume a life of their own. Linking them all is wit, inventiveness and the sharply focused intelligence of Christine Brooke-Rose, a great European humanist writer.

She is eighty. Facing death, she becomes 'a cruising mind', lost in sequences of unabstract comic detail, in - as the title implies - a kind of index, rigid, arbitrary, pointing backwards into the lived text. The head top leans against the bathroom mirror so that the looking glass becomes a feeling glass. She is getting worse day by day, and yet she goes on, deeper into meaning, into non-meaning, with a kind of wry eagerness. She is not disappointed with her life. In order to distract herself, to place herself, she attends to what the media say about the world as if what they say was actually the world. She reflects on her own career, on her experiments with narrative, and on the narrative she is writing here: therapy, fun, but anything else, anything more? What is its purpose, and what the purpose of the life that lives it in the writing? She discovers how, as in fiction, as in any form of experiment, the difficulty for the handicapped is less the handicap than other people, and they too have their lives and handicaps. She becomes like them, she becomes one of them, an other person.Reasserting herself, at the centre of the book, in a mock-technical lecture from a character to an author who is not interested, she comes to accept that her experiments in narrative are like pain-killers, and that they no longer matter, like life.

The Battle of Reichenfels has been fought and lost. The army is in flight. The enemy is expected to arrive in town at any moment. A soldier, carrying a parcel under his arm, is wandering through an unknown town. All the streets look the same, and he cannot remember the name of one where he was supposed to meet the man who had agreed to take the parcel. But he must deliver the parcel or at least get rid of it... A brilliant work from one of the finest exponents of the Nouveau Roman, In the Labyrinth showcases an inventive, hypnotic style which creates an uncanny atmosphere of deja vu, yet undermines the reader's expectations at every turn.

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. Her linguistic prowess, her uncommon role as a recognized writer of fiction and theory, and the relevance of her work to the feminist and other modern movements, all contribute to the interest of this unusual sequence of essays. Christine Brooke-Rose, formerly a professor at the Universite de Paris, and now retired, lives in France. She is the author of several works of literary criticism and a number of novels, including Amalgamemnon and Xorander.

Umberto Eco, international bestselling novelist and literary theorist, here brings together these two roles in a provocative discussion of the vexed question of literary interpretation. The limits of interpretation - what a text can actually be said to mean - are of double interest to a semiotician whose own novels' intriguing complexity has provoked his readers into intense speculation as to their meaning. Eco's discussion ranges from Dante to The Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum to Chomsky and Derrida, and bears all the hallmarks of his personal style. Three of the world's leading figures in philosophy, literary theory and criticism take up the challenge of entering into debate with Eco on the question of interpretation. Richard Rorty, Jonathan Culler and Christine Brooke-Rose each add a distinctive perspective on this contentious topic, contributing to an exchange of ideas between some of the foremost theorists in the field. The work is intended for students and scholars of literary theory and philosophy (especially semiotics).

This 1981 book is a study of wide range of fiction, from short stories to tales of horror, from fairy-tales and romances to science fiction, to which the rather loose term 'fantastic' has been applied. Cutting across this wide field, Professor Brooke-Rose examines in a clear and precise way the essential differences between these types of narrative against the background of realistic fiction. In doing so, she employs many of the methods of modern literary theory from Russian formalism to structuralism, while at the same time bringing to these approaches a sharp critical intuition and sound common sense of her own. The range of texts considered is broad: from Poe and James to Tolkien; from Flann O'Brien to the American postmodernism. This book should prove a source of stimulation to all teachers and students of modern literary theory and genre, as well as those interested in 'fantastic' literature.

Twenty-nine year old Julia Grampion has just received her doctorate at London University, but life is looking rather dismal. Her affair with Paul has ended, and she drifts to a relationship with Bernard, learning a different and changeable idiom of love, learning how language disguises the shifting uncertainties of the human ties that bind. The story is set in a cosmopolitan 1950s London featuring university departments, the Reading Room of the British Museum, espresso bars and little Soho restaurants, publishers' parties, and a Bloomsbury "room of one's own." The characters are many and varied, including Bernard, Julia's new lover, a sensual, cultured, and selfish academic, with a learned French wife, Nicolette; Paul, charming and still in love with Julia, devoted and unwilling or unable to transgress the laws of his Church; East African student Hussein, passionate and intelligent, simple and prompt with Sanuri proverbs, like a sudden and refreshing oasis appearing in the desert of the arid London life, that express his love for the beautiful Georgina. A first novel of drollery and intelligence, marking the arrival of the unrivalled and extraordinary talent of Christine Brooke-Rose. "She is a scholar and a wit and her first novel is delightful. She turns pedantry into a fool's bladder."-JOHN DAVENPORT, The Observer "Miss Brooke-Rose is a new novelist worth watching."-Evening Standard "Among women novelists of the post-war generation, Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Jane Howard and Christine Brooke-Rose make a formidable trio."-Church Times "She takes a splendid swipe at her go-getting cultural profiteers . . . she has also drawn a most devastating picture of cosy spiritual smugness among the elite."-PETER GREEN, Daily Telegraph

Verbivoracious Press publishes a triannual festschrift celebrating the work of lesser-known European writers. The flagship issue fetes Christine Brooke-Rose, one of the most innovative voices of the twentieth century, whose fiction plays challenging games with form and structure, using grammatical constraints, multiple languages, and a dicing of genre styles and theoretical discourses as an integral component of her novels. Brooke-Rose is among an unfortunate revue of writers whose work is fading out of print, rarely part of critical or academic discussion. This issue contains creative responses to her fiction and criticism, written with an eye to the general literary reader unfamiliar with her output, but with enough homage, parody, imitation, and criticism to excite her devoted fan base. Among the contents: a detailed essay on her writing constraints and illustrative examples of her complex techniques, alongside short stories, critical essays, and assorted unclassifiable pieces in thrall to her many modes. This issue also contains rare material by Brooke-Rose herself, including a re-print of her first-ever publication, the long poem Gold.

A woman about to lose her job as a professor of literature and history delivers a passionate, witty and word-mad monologue in this inventive novel, which was called: "brilliant". ("The Listener"), "Dazzling" ("The Guardian"), "Elegant, rueful and witty". ("The Observer" upon its original publication in England in 1984). History and literature seem to be losing ground to the brave new world of electronic media and technology, and battle lines are being drawn between the humanities and technology, the first world and the third world, women and men. Narrator Mira Enketei erases those boundaries in her punning monologue, blurring the texts of Herodotus with the callers to a talk-radio program, and blending contemporary history with ancient: fairy tale and literal / invented people (the kidnappers of capitalism, a girl-warrior from Somalia, a pop singer, a political writer), connected by an elaborate mock-genealogy stretching back to the Greek gods, move in and out of each other's stories. The narrator sometimes sees herself as Cassandra, condemned by Apollo to prophesy but never to be believed, enslaved by Agamemnon after the fall of Troy.Brooke-Rose amalgamates ancient literature with modern crises to produce a powerfulo novel about the future of culture.

History and literature seem to be losing ground in the contemporary world of electronic media, and battle lines have been drawn between the humanities and technology, the first world and the third, women and men. Narrator Mira Enketei erases these boundaries in a punning monologue that blends the contemporary with the historical, and in which she sees herself as Cassandra, condemned by Apollo to prophesy but never to be believed, enslaved by Agamemnon after the fall of Troy. Here, Brooke-Rose amalgamates ancient literature and modern anxieties to produce a powerful novel about our future.