Speculative Biography: Experiments, Opportunities and Provocations Donna Lee Brien and Kiera Lindsey, editors Routledge, 2022, 332 pp. ISBN 9780367515829, $170.00 hardback; ISBN 9780367515843, $52.95 paperback. Routledge Auto/Biography Studies

In the collection Speculative Biography: Experiments, Opportunities and Provocations, editors Donna Lee Brien and Kiera Lindsey, and their diverse contributors, explore how a new generation of biographers self-consciously navigate questions of form and ethics. “Speculative biography” is a model of biographical writing in which authors overtly engage with the presence of subjectivity, the instability of facts and records, and the ethics of narration in biographical form. The collection contends with an either/or model for biographical writing (as fact or fiction) that has tended to characterize, and limit, disciplinary debates.

Speculative Biography is the first collection of scholarship published to identify and reflect on speculative biography as a distinct genre. Notably, this volume is comprised of contributors who are all also writing the form...