Brian McHale is Distinguished Arts and Humanities Professor of English at the Ohio State University. He was for many years associated with the Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics at Tel Aviv University in Israel, and was an editor of the international journal, Poetics Today. He is one of the founding members of Project Narrative at Ohio State, and current president (2010-11) of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP). The author of three books on postmodernist fiction and poetry – Postmodernist Fiction (1987), Constructing Postmodernism (1992), and The Obligation toward the Difficult Whole: Postmodernist Long Poems (2004) – he has also published many articles on modernist and postmodernist fiction and poetry, narrative theory, and science fiction. He is co-editor, with Randall Stevenson, of the Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century Literatures in English (2006); with David Herman and James Phelan, of Teaching Narrative Theory (2010); and, with Luc Herman and Inger Dalsgaard, of the Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon (forthcoming). He is currently co-editing with Joe Bray and Alison Gibbon the Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature.