Forrest Aguirre, ed. Text:UR – The New Book of Masks. Hyattsville: Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2007. 232 pp. Hardcover. ISBN 1933293209.

Featuring such award winning writers as Brian Evenson, Lance Olsen, Rikki Ducornet, and Terese Svoboda, Forrest Aguirre’s anthology Text:Ur – The New Book of Masks includes both experimental and traditional fiction, all of which is imaginative, quirky, and wonderfully surreal. Short stories and flash fiction in this anthology depict such diverse subjects as the strange worlds that lurk within libraries, children built from parchment and twigs, and evil dictators. These pieces are similar in their match-up of form and content, often using the shape of the narrative, sentence structure, and other formal devices to convey the story to readers.

Toiya Kristen Finley’s “The Avatar of Background Noise,” which portrays the libraries of people’s thoughts and daydreams as well as the scholars who research there, exemplifies this match-up of form and content. Told from the point of view of one of these scholars, Endnoter, the narrative is often interrupted by pages from the manuscripts of the author’s thoughts and musings, simultaneously explaining and complicating the main story. For example, as Endnoter and his crew sifts through the mind of an author who is writing fantasy novels, the narrative is interrupted by one of her thoughts: “Fantasy novels set in Ratasharia sell very well, and now I’m going to be writing a ton of them.  They will ‘mimic reality’” (35). The narrative itself is set in Ratasharia and mimics the reality of university scholars. Notes like this one create ironic twists to Finely’s story. Other stories (e.g. Tom Miller’s “The Fifth Tale: When the Devil Met Baldrick Beckenbauer” and Jay Lake and Ruth Nestvold’s “Incipit”) use similar formal devices, such as footnotes and text boxes, to augment their stories. Each writer gracefully weaves together multiple strands of narrative.

The collection is self-consciously experimental, but it also features more conventional work. Nadia Gregor’s “Faure, Envenomed, Dictates,” for instance, is the tale of an attempted assassination of an evil dictator. Constructed mainly of declarative sentences, the narrator's tone is formal, reflecting the order and militarism of the dictatorship that he describes. The repetition of character names and the absence of contractions add to this staunch, military quality, which contrasts nicely with the story's humor.

Text:Ur is diverse, fun, and well-crafted. A rich introduction to these innovative authors, it is filled with inventive, audacious, and intelligent work. Anyone looking for a compilation of daring, high-quality fiction will enjoy this book.

— Kristina Marie Darling