Fiction is the last battleground between modernism and the academy, and is the best demonstration of the alliance and pattern of succession that modernism and post-modernism have established. The "innovative fictions" sampled in Breakthrough Fictioneers are seen by editor Richard Kostelanetz as moving…. In proving his point Kostelanetz draws on the work of ninety-eight authors, the inclusion of some of whom in an anthology of "fiction" may seem far-fetched, no matter how generous the rationale. But that rationale is elucidated with convincing insight with the observation that "fictions … favor sequential forms (and yet remain distinct from film), or the difference between the material on one page and its successors (and predecessors) often generates the work's internal event." The presence of "straight" poetry, theater, photography, comic strip, and other orthodox forms seems justified: the category of fiction is strained, but it ought to be. To burst its parameters, as...