Everyone’s talking about fanfiction these days, thanks to Fifty Shades of Grey. But for a very, very long time, they weren’t. Even people who wrote it didn’t talk about it. Fanfiction may have been an open secret, but it was a closed closet. Fic opens that closet door and puts its contents on display: its most darling outfits, its awkward years, and those horrors from the ‘80s that no retro-chic is ever bringing back.

From remixes and crossovers to alternate-point-of-view, alternate-ending retellings, Fic looks at the history and culture of fan writing, and presents provocative discussions on fanfiction from both fan and professional writers. It looks at the way fanfiction not only redraws the boundaries of stories and characters, but also transforms how we think about and experience authorship, reading, writing, and more.