Collaborative Writing Reading List

This list, far from comrehensive, is limited to books of original writing credited to more than one author. In some cases we include collaboratively authored books from other genres because the collaboration is foregrounded, or because they excite us.

Adorno, Theodore, and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. The authors state that their disagreements provide the dialectic that, hundreds of unreasonably dense pages later, may lead to enlightenment. This is a heavy, beautiful book.

Ashbery, John, and Robert Shuyler. A Nest of Ninnies. Keith Waldrop claims that this collaborative novel was written using the procedure of having the two authors alternate sentences. Unless they lived very close to one another, I suspect this rumor is apocryphal, but is a good idea nonetheless.

Brün, Marianne, and Respondents. Designing Society. 1985. A living-book with about 36 authors, including Zeus.

Beckman, Joshua & Mathew Rohrer. Nice Hat. Thanks. 2002. If it's good enough for Tyler, it's good enough for me.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, and William Wordsworth. Lyrical Ballads. 1798.

Gillespie, William; Frank Marquardt, Scott Rettberg, Dirk Stratton. The Unknown. 1998-2002. http://www.unknownhypertext.com. The Unknown: An Anthology. 2002. The rock band model of authorship.

Hejinian, Lyn, and Leslie Scalopino. Sight.

Marx & Engels. The German Ideology. The Communist Manifesto. These guys were the Lennon-McCartney of political thought, and they stand as one of the greatest geniuses of all time.

Mayer, Bernadette, et al. The 3:15 Experiment. Utopia.

Queen, Ellery was actually Frederic Dannay & Manfred B. Lee. The cousins wrote 82 books together.

Seattle. Invisible Seattle: The Novel of Seattle. 1987. A novel by the city of the same name.

Waldrop, Keith & Rosmarie. These two have put in at least four lifetimes of work as publishers, translators, writers, friends, and collaborators. Their collaborative autiobiography is Ceci n'est pas Keith / Ceci n'est pas Rosmarie (2002). Their volumes of collaborative poetry include Until Volume One (1973), Since Volume One (1975), and Light Travels (1992). Oh, and Well Well Reality.