The Newsletter of
The Council for the Literature of the Fantastic
Volume 1, Number 4 (1997)
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THE CLF/PERMEABLE PARTNERSHIP

CLF, the Council for the Literature of the Fantastic, has been raising both hackles and consciousness over the two-year course of its existence. Based at the University of Rhode Island , and starting out with shoestring funding from the school and from the State, we've managed to persist in our gadfly role by combining symbiotically with Permeable Press . The current "new series" PUCK incorporates what separately would have been the fourth issue of the CLF News. (A subscription to PUCK is therefore a subscription to the ongoing CLF News as well.)

CLF's goals, which overlap with Permeable's , focus on improving public awareness and public appreciation of that underground stream we call the Literary Fantastic (or Literary Fabulism, or LF), largely lost to view beneath the swollen tide of mainstream Literary Realism. LF, the literary fantastic, has been devalued over the course of more than a century. In a literary-critical milieu that tends to equate "serious" writing with Realism, American writers in the fantastic vein, if published at all, wind up more than likely on the pop- and kiddie-lit "genre" shelves, unable to call serious critical attention to themselves, despite the fact that LF writers like Irving, Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville constituted the mainstream of American literary fiction during most of our truly "fabulous" preceding century. PUCK will continue to be a forum, then, in which the finest work in the fantastic mode will be promoted, reviewed, and celebrated.