Stretto
A Fiction Series for Roman Books
Series Editor: Jonathan Taylor
‘. . . a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses.’
– Mikhail Bakhtin
Stretto is Italian for ‘narrow’ or ‘close,’ often used by musicians to refer to climactic sections of fugues where the voices overlap more closely, where the polyphonic texture is particularly intense. Stretto is now also a ground-breaking series of novels, novellas and short fictions, which takes on Mikhail Bakhtin’s well-known conception of ‘polyphonic’ literature, intensifying it, playing with it, developing it in new contexts. Here are fictions which are multi-voiced, polyphonic, fugal in many different ways: fictions which are multi-perspectival; fictions which stage clashing, sometimes dissonant voices; fictions which hear from marginalised people; fictions which interweave human voices and musical voices; fictions which engage with voices from other places, other disciplines, other worlds. Above all, here are stories which are themselves musical, lyrical, dynamically contrapuntal.
