The Fanfiction Reader: Folk Tales for the Digital Age
Ta-da! Straight from its debut this weekend in Chicago at SCMS 2017!
The Fanfiction Reader: Folk Tales for the Digital Age is a collection of fanfiction stories from a variety of big western media fandoms – Star Trek, Star Wars, X-Files, Buffy, Doctor Who, HP, MCU, popslash, etc. vaguely modeled on The Canterbury Tales – each with a contextualizing essay by me and featuring introductions and other scholarly apparatus also by me.
This book was designed for classroom use – for teachers who want to teach a class or a unit on fanfiction (see a list of some current classes here at Fanlore) without sending their students to the wilds of the internet (and/or without bothering fanfiction-writing fans.) The stories were selected to represent a range of tropes and themes and also for their teachability.
The book was also created as a case study in transformative fair use; it was put together for an educational purpose and published with a non-profit scholarly press; all of the stories in this book remain available for free on the internet in their original archives; all royalties from the book are being donated to the Organization For Transformative Works & the Archive of Our Own.
A note to teachers: ordered together with The Fan Fiction Studies Reader (U. Iowa, 2014) or Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over The World (Smartpop, 2013), you have a course in a bottle: everything for your fanfic-teaching needs!
A note to fandom: This book is aimed at the classroom, not at fandom, though I have tried to write as fannish an academic book as possible & one with at least some of the spirit. (Also: I totally didn’t write that book copy up there about 50 Shades of Gray, I’m just saying. 😀 They don’t ask me about the book copy!)
The Fanfiction Reader is also available at Amazon.com or directly from the University of Michigan website, which was distributing a 30% off code at SCMS that is good until April 26, 2016: UMSCMS17. (Shout out to U. Michigan Press for their support of fandom, open access, and fair use.) Or there’s a big chunk available on Googlebooks if you just want to see what the hell the thing is.