The collected essays of the cofounder of the New Narrative movement, on theory, identity, poetry, and muses from Kathy Acker to Georges Bataille. I read and wrote to invoke what seemed impossible-relation itself-in order to take part in a world that ceaselessly makes itself up, to 'wake up' to the world, to recognize the world, to be convinced that the world exists, to take revenge on the world for not existing. -from Communal Nude Since cofounding San Francisco's influential New Narrative circle in 1979, Robert Gluck has been one of America's finest prose stylists of innovative fiction, bending narrative into the service of autobiography, politics, and gay writing. This collection brings together for the first time Gluck's nonfiction, a revelatory body of work that anchors his writing practice. Gluck's essays explore the ways that storytelling and selfhood are mutually embedded cultural forms, cohering a fractured social reality where generating narrative means generating identity