Robert Glück founded the San Francisco-based New Narrative movement with Bruce Boone, Camille Roy, and others in the early 1980s, in reaction to Language poetry. New Narrative writing celebrates LGBTQ identity, autobiography, poetic disjunction, critical theory, gossip, pop culture, fable, and sexuality. Other writers associated with New Narrative include Steve Abbott, Kathy Acker, Dodie Bellamy, Mary Burger, Dennis Cooper, Sam D’Allesandro, Kevin Killian, and Gail Scott.

This collection of stories by Robert Glück was originally published in 1982 in San Francisco by Four Seasons Foundation under the title Elements of a Coffee Service.

Dodie Bellamy’s Cunt-Ups, first published in 2001 and recipient of the Firecracker Award for Innovative Poetry, was immediately a controversial and celebrated work. Using the “cut-up” method of William S. Burroughs, Cunt-Ups is a work of sex magick, based on source texts from old lovers and Jeffery Dahmer transcriptions. The resulting spell queers everything around it.

The Bigness of Things surveys the intersection of New Narrative, San Francisco’s queer-and-punk-infused writing avant-garde, and visual culture, through photographs and essays on visual art, literary journals, and film. Including essays by Matt Sussman, Brandon Callender, Jamie Townsend, Stephanie Young, Ismail Muhammad, Syd Staiti, Brandon Brown; art from the Homes of Bruce Boone, Robert Glück, Jocely Saidenberg, Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian; and stills from the Films of Marc Huestis, Abigail Child, Cecilia Dougherty, and Leslie Singer.