New Narrative is a literary and aesthetic movement that originated in San Francisco in the late 1970s with writers and novelists Robert Glück and Bruce Boone. Influenced by Language poetry and feminist poetry of the period, New Narrative moved toward a hybrid aesthetic that emphasized, according to Glück, “the ways language conveys silence, chaos, undifferentiated existence, and erects countless horizons of meaning.” The movement was also informed by San Francisco gay culture and the AIDS crisis and aimed to rewrite theories of sex, sexuality, and individual authorship. In aiming to elaborate on narration itself, New Narrative offers the frame text-metatext, a story that constantly relates to and comments on itself from the present.
Well-known writers associated with this movement include Kevin Killian, Dodie Bellamy, Kathy Acker, Chris Kraus, and Judy Grahn. New Narrative’s second wave of writers included Rob Halpern, Renee Gladman, Douglas A. Martin, and Heriberto Yépez.Kevin Killian and Dodie Bellamy edited the anthology, Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative Writing 1977–1997 (Nightboat Books, 2017), in which they gathered classic and supplemental New Narrative texts, essays, and interviews.