The University of Iowa Press has just released Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction by Jill Talbot.

Metawriting—the writing about writing or writing that calls attention to itself as writing—has been around since Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy, but Jill Talbot makes the case that now more than ever the act of metawriting is performed on a daily basis by anyone with a Facebook profile, a Twitter account, or a webpage. Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction is the first collection to combine metawriting in both fiction and nonfiction.

Metawritings provides a context for the presence of metawriting in contemporary literature within the framework of the digital age’s obsessively self-conscious modes of communication: status updates, Tweets, YouTube clips, and blogs (whose anonymity creates opportunities for outright deception) capture our meta-lives in 140 characters and video uploads, while we watch self-referential, self-conscious television (The Simpsons, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Office).

Dinty W. Moore, the author of Between Panic and Desire, wrote, “Filled with excellent examples and lively contributor interviews, Jill Talbot’s playful and illuminating Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction clearly delineates the key differences (and similarities) between the meta-acts of fiction and nonfiction. A fascinating anthology, front to back.”

Talbot is author of Loaded: Women and Addiction and coeditor of The Art of Friction: Where (Non)Fictions Come Together. Her work has appeared in journals including the Notre Dame Review, Under the Sun, Blue Mesa Review, Cimarron Review, Segue, and Ecotone. She teaches nonfiction at St. Lawrence University.

The book is available at bookstores or from the UI Press, 800-621-2736 or www.uiowapress.org. Customers in Europe, the Middle East, or Africa may order from Eurospan Group at www.eurospanbookstore.com.