Encyclopedia Vol 1 A-E - Hardcover

Tisa Bryant, Miranda F. Mellis and Kate Schatz are three writers, educators and editors who live in Brooklyn, San Francisco and Oakland, respectively. They received MFAs in Literary Arts from Brown University, and are published authors in their own right.

Tisa Bryant is the author of Unexplained Presence, (Leon Works, 2007), a collection of hybrid essays on black presences in Eurocentric film, literature and visual art; Miranda F. Mellis is author of the techno-novella, The Revisionist (Calamari Press, 2007) and Kate Schatz is author of Rid of Me (Continuum 33 1/3 Series, 2007), a playlist of short stories loosely based the PJ Harvey album of the same name.

The design is much in imitation of the Golden Books period of American encyclopedias. it features a wealth of illustrations, as in Anna Joy Springer's rebus about studying with ACKER, KATHY; as well as an entire section of lavishly reproduced color plates. It boasts great interviews, as in Jacob Eichert's entry EXENE; and Afua Kafi-Akua's CARTER, BETTY. It reproduces the entirety of Jorge Luis Borges's story, Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, which not only serves as an important precursor for this project but is one of the greatest of twentieth-century short stories. [Y]et there are also abundant entries for which the fictive space runs more along the poetical lines[...] There are, of course, innumerable other noteworthy entries. --Rick Moody, The Believer, February 2007

Encyclopedia Vl. 1 A-E offers 336 pages of cross-referenced entries by 114 contributors. The entries range from bildungsroman to celebrity to epic, taking the form of essays, blog excerpts, e-mail exchanges, lists, prose poems, video stills, and drawings. The book's unorthodox form and content follows from a similarly inventive method of solicitation. the compilers composed an expansive list of words, sent customized lists to more than 200 writers and artists, and asked them to provide an entry between one sentence and 4000 words. The resulting disparate group includes sci-fi auteur Samuel R. Delany, poets Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop, artists Laylah Ali and Zak Smith, and authors Carole Maso, Thalia Field and Brian Evenson. --Alexander Provan, The Providence Phoenix, May 2006