Richard Kostelanetz has been publishing radically alternative stories, mostly in literary magazines, for nearly five decades. As many of his recent titles explore the territories between literature and book-art, he has also produced fictions for extended surfaces (Contagion: A Novel, 2004); audiotape (Seductions, 1981; Acoustic Fictions, 1992); videotape (Video Fictions, 2004); and film (Epiphanies, 1981-1993).

This work has been recognized in histories of American literature since the 1970s, most visibly in the Columbia History of American Literature (1989). Individual entries on his fiction have appeared in the encyclopedic Contemporary Novelists since the 1970s, while the entries on Kostelanetz in A Reader’s Guide to 20th Century Writing (1995) and the Merriam‑Webster Encyclopedia of Literature (1995) have emphasized his fiction. (His name is one of a thousand living and dead in the first volume and one of ten thousand from all time in the second volume.)

Kostelanetz has also edited three anthologies exclusively of fiction, Twelve from the Sixties (1967), Future’s Fictions (1971), and Breakthrough Fictioneers (1973), in addition to several other collections including fiction along with other kinds of work. His fugitive fiction criticism was collected as The Old Fictions and the New (1987). Other Kostelanetz books have poetry, experimental prose, performance texts, criticism, and cultural history. His prints, book-art, audiotapes, videotapes, holograms, and films have been exhibited around the world. He was born in 1940 in New York City, where he still lives, unaffiliated.