Almost Island has always wanted to examine certain aspects of literature closely, and find ways to get at them that are meaningful and fundamental without being narrow or reductive. To start with, we wanted to build an issue that revolves around style.

What do we intuit about (in this case, verbal) style? In the work of its most skilled and forceful practitioners, it appears immediately. It is somehow obvious. It might be perceived as an excess, a haunting, an intrinsic uncertain, but – equally – a definite contour. It is an indisputable suffusing presence, but remains nearly impossible to describe.

Style is grainy; it will not be reduced, it will not be easily scaled. It may follow the rules, but no rule can generate it. Style changes, moves through time, inverts; it cannot by definition be predicted. We might hold fast to style as evidence of the individual, the distinctive; yet it can never shake the link to another shore, to imitation, convention, recognition, mask, transmission. Style seems to act as some kind of conduit or bond between private and public meaning. It seems to step in where simple communication fails.

Most importantly, style cannot be “peeled off”. Form and content will not be separated.

We are aware that there has been a fertile if ultimately unresolved and sometimes overly microscopic debate on style within literary studies and art history, a perplexing and possibly contentious one in philosophy. However, we wanted to go further and ask, what is the nature of written style as a possibility that “literature” – as it has so far established itself – might offer to