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Join NOW!I’m quite sure that if I lived when Gertrude Stein did, I would have not enjoyed her person—the pronouncements, the relentless self-promotion, the blatant self-absorption (“I am a genius”). If I lived in her time I probably, like so many else then, would not have enjoyed her writing either—the repetitions, the lack of story, the […]
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Following in the steps of such modern day masters of this intricate form, including Lydia Davis and Kim Chinquee, Scott Garson has embraced it, bringing his own brand of American disharmony often seen in those forbears. The majority of stories in his second collection Is That You, John Wayne? run from a page long to three and they are the crux of this collection bent on exploring the sadness of life, the missed or missing opportunities, and the stasis our collective cultures seemed to have emotionally entered while we fly and speed about with technology that probably has not made us treat each other any better.
...moreI am trying to charm the reader because I want him and her to come with me deeper into the piece. If you can bring them with you there, things get more interesting.
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Micheline Aharonian Marcom discusses The Mirror in the Well, its carnal language, eros, and the pros and cons of social media.
...moreWhat is emotionally naked art and why do I think I have to describe the films of John Cassavetes, particularly A Woman Under the Influence, and Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives, particularly “Melanctha,” that way?
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Lydia Davis is the author of four short story collections, as well as The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis and the novel The End of the Story. A MacArthur Fellow, she has been a finalist for many major book awards and this September will release her translation of Madame Bovary. Much of Davis’s fiction, from […]
...moreMagic in movies is a beautiful thing. I’ve inundated myself with film for years, since the age of nineteen, but only recently experienced the pleasure of being put under a spell by two directors I had known of, but whose images I was not ready for.
...moreIn curt sentences detailing many unsettled lives, Kim Chinquee constructs a mosaic of despair in modern day America. Life is already hard, but attempts at intimacy (what many of the people in these pages seek) do not always further the characters’ life but leaves them confused and sorry—sometimes stoic.
...more“I can’t write about what’s going on in the next room, fiction. I can only write what’s going on in this room, reality. Of course one invents with reality also.”
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