How Encyclopedia Works

To begin, we made a huge list of potential contributors, casting our nets as far and wide as possible, including people from multiple scenes, movements and geographical locations, as well as attending to a diversity of ethnicity, age, experience, gender, and preference.

In addition to this list, we generated a voluminous list of possible entries that began with A-E. We began by thinking of words related to fiction—beginning, ending, chapter, crisis, etc.—and from there it spiraled outward, encompassing proper names, film and book titles, emotional states, and much more. From there, we sent a solicitation letter with a list of A-E words to every person on our list, and asked each person to create entries for one or more of the words on their list. We intentionally drew on our particular knowledge of that person’s work, giving them some words that corresponded to their interests, as well as fairly random words. Entries could range in length from one sentence to 4,000 words, and could be fiction, criticism, essay, art, or any combination thereof, as long as it was, in some way, guided by our question: What occurs under the sign of fiction?

Responses range from aleatory to alter-ego, bees to bildungsroman, catatonic to celebrity, detective to denouément, epistolary to epic, and entries include short stories, experimental prose, lyric essays, photography, plays, paintings, woodcuts, a rebus, blog excerpts, email exchanges, letters, drawings, lists and digital video stills. Entries are indexed either by content, title, or by proper name of author, and most entires are cross-referenced, creating unexpected conversations between otherwise disparate works. A traditional encyclopedia’s entries, including cross-references, are mapped out in advance by the editors.  In contrast, since we gave lists of words for contributors to choose from, the process of editing our encyclopedia was one-part chance operation and one-part curation.

Encyclopedia Vol. 2 F-K will traverse everything from fable to food, ghost story to global warming, hip hop to habitat, intertext to Iraq, jouissance to jail, and kitsch to Katrina.