Crucibles: Walser Before & After

William Pierce is editor of AGNI. His short stories have appeared in Granta, Ecotone, American Literary Review, and elsewhere. Excerpts from his novel Twenty Sixteen can be found in Harvard Review, The Western Humanities Review, and on the Freeman’s channel at Literary Hub. Other work has appeared in Electric Literature, Little Star, Tin House online, The Writer’s Chronicle, Solstice, Glimmer Train, Consequence, and as part of MacArthur Fellow Anna Schuleit Haber’s art project “The Alphabet,” commissioned by the Fitchburg Art Museum. Pierce is the author of Reality Hunger: On Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle (Arrowsmith Press, 2016), a monograph first serialized as a three-part essay at The Los Angeles Review of Books. More at williampiercewriter.com. (updated 10/2025)

His first essay for AGNI, “Fabulously Real,” received special mention in the 2006 Pushcart Prize anthology. His introduction to AGNI 91, “The Peculiarities of Literary Meaning,” was cited in the 2022 Pushcart anthology, and his introductions to AGNI 98 and AGNI 100 were Notables in The Best American Essays. He is interviewed here at NewPages.com. With E. C. Osondu, he coedited The AGNI Portfolio of African Fiction.