Foreword from the Editor Our Strange and Wonderful House de ed easy categorisation from the very moment of its inception. Although it was a “Challenge” by the standards of the digital classi cation system of the collaborative ction-hosting website Ficly, the introduction written for the so-called Challenge by the writer known only by the colourfully meaningless handle of Zxvasdf welcomed readers and would-be writers with the following statement of intent: “Let me make one thing clear: this is not a challenge. It is your chance to become one of many architects of an impossible house. This challenge merely serves to keep our contributions in one place as to be more readily accessible than it normally would be.” Cunningly, yet frustratingly, it elided any literary terminology, casting the writers as “architects” of the titular House. When we set about the task of collecting all the shards of Our Strange and Wonderful House into one de nitive book, we were thus faced with the peculiar challenge of guring out what, precisely, kind of book it was that we had decided to bring into the world. What Our Strange and Wonderful House certainly is not, despite appearances, is a collection of short stories. To begin with, its ninety-odd fragments are not generally stories. Two of them, Sir Bic’s I Am An Athenaeum and McKennab’s The Spinning Room, are written in verse, and many others, were they to be published by themselves, could be termed prose poems without argument. Indeed, although many of the fragments happen to function as narratives in their own right, Our Strange and Wonderful House’s overall structure was never meant to be a narrative one. The original premise called for contributors to write vignettes focusing on the many rooms and areas of the House, not on its inhabitants.
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