“The best work of literary criticism I’ve read so far this year.” - Literary Hub “Alison’s book is like a cold shower to ward off the standard narrative arc and rewire our mental circuitry to see the patterns of nature in the structure of novels.” - Chicago Review of Books “You don’t have to be a professional writer to enjoy novelist Jane Alison’s brilliant new craft guide.” - Chicago Tribune

“Alison’s close readings can be exhilarating… Alison’s prose is potent and lush, her enthusiasm infectious.” - New Yorker “In her boundlessly inventive look at narrative form…Alison would have readers conceive of other dramatic shapes…including waves in Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus meandering paths, like rivers or snail trails, that allow the reader to ‘wander a bit, look about, pause’…It would do a disservice to this work to pigeonhole it as ‘literary criticism ' the study is filled with clarity and wit, underlain with formidable erudition.” It will appeal to serious readers and writers alike. It is a liberating manifesto that says, Let’s leave the outdated modes behind and, in thinking of new modes, bring feeling back to experimentation. Meander, Spiral, Explode is a singular and brilliant elucidation of literary strategies that also brings high spirits and wit to its original conclusions.

Other writers of nonlinear prose considered in her “museum of specimens” include Nicholson Baker, Anne Carson, Marguerite Duras, Gabriel García Márquez, Jamaica Kincaid, Clarice Lispector, Susan Minot, David Mitchell, Caryl Phillips, and Mary Robison. Sebald’s Emigrants was the first novel to show Alison how forward momentum can be created by way of pattern, rather than the traditional arc―or, in nature, wave. Why should writers follow Aristotle? Jane Alison in her fresh, original book about narrative is our new Aristotle.” ―Edmund White, author of The Unpunished Vice: A Life of ReadingĪs Jane Alison writes in the introduction to her insightful and appealing book about the craft of writing: “For centuries there’s been one path through fiction we’re most likely to travel―one we’re actually told to follow―and that’s the dramatic arc: a situation arises, grows tense, reaches a peak, subsides…But something that swells and tautens until climax, then collapses? Bit masculo-sexual, no? So many other patterns run through nature, tracing other deep motions in life.

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