Wild Forms is a field guide to 25 years of literary invention and the writers, artists, and small presses that changed what a book could be.
Since 2000, literature has absorbed the material surrounding it: photographs, court transcripts, government files, damaged archives, obsolete software, dead websites, procedural rules, and decaying code. Writers worked with what survived, often leaving the seams visible.
George Myers Jr. traces this history through hundreds of formally inventive works, from Anne Carson’s accordion-spine elegy Nox and Mark Z. Danielewski’s typographic labyrinth House of Leaves to artists’ books, documentary collage, visual writing, hypertext, hand-sewn editions, and fragile digital experiments.
Wild Forms is the first materially attentive history of contemporary literature told through its edges: folds, perforations, redactions, glitches, recovered fragments, and books that refuse to behave like ordinary books.