Thirty years ago, American literature was turned on its ear by a band of young writers whose work challenged the essence of the fictional narrative itself. The social mayhem of the sixties and seventies inspired a new wave of work variously known as postmodern, irrealist, metafictional, or experimental. Suddenly, American fiction goaded and shocked audiences with self-referential tactics and other extremes in form and genre.

This was the height of the antistory, when plot and punctuation were often thrown to the wind as writers emphasized disorder over order, style over content, and nonnarrative over narrative formulations. Fictional settings grew equally uncertain, and characters had disembodied voices or no voice at all. It was an outrageous, controversial time when a nation and its literature exploded and raised questions not only about the past of fiction but about its future.

1. Transgressions: The Iowa Anthology of Innovative Fiction, selected and edited by past and present editors of the Iowa Review picks up where the sixties and seventies left off, presenting work by masters of the "experimental" movement as well as debuting young writers who find new ways to offer nontraditional forms. William Gass, one of the nation's most notable writers of both fiction and literary-philosophical essays, contributes the foreword and a story to this volume.