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What I Didn’t See and Other Stories by Karen Joy Fowler
What I Didn’t See and Other Stories is an excellent story collection. I’m going to treat it the same way as I do my Anthologizing posts and talk about the stories I want to talk about in the way I want...
View ArticleLiner notes for Conference
My short story “Conference” was published in the latest issue of Irreantum, the literary journal for the Association for Mormon Letters. The idea for this story came to me while I was flying from...
View ArticleLiner notes for The ReActivator
“The ReActivator” was previously published as the fifth and final story of my short short story suite “Gentle Persuasions” in Dialogue’s Fall 2009 issue. When the Four Centuries of Mormon Stories...
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Samuel R. Delany on structure, part one
I’ve been slowly working my way through Samuel R. Delany’s About Writing: Seven Essays, Four Letters and Five Interviews. I’m enjoying it very much. It’s challenging, idiosyncratic, precise, erudite,...
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Why The Dead is crucial to understanding Joyce’s Dubliners
I recently re-read Dubliners 1 for the first time in a decade or so. As I did, I was looking to understand the structure of the stories in order to improve as a writer, but I also had in mind a comment...
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Collectionizing: Karen Russell’s Vampires in the Lemon Grove
With her collection “Vampires in the Lemon Grove”, Russell wins the 2013 WHM prize for melding literary and genre and the humorous with the horrific/uncanny/dark. I suppose there could be other...
View ArticleReader expectations and the SFnality of State of Grace and Tenth of December
Over the summer I read two works of fiction that had an SFnality to them that I was not expecting: the novel State of Grace by Ann Patchett and the story collection Tenth of December by George...
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Adjectives in fiction and the bourgeois project of evaluation
Franco Moretti’s The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature is an interesting blend of digital humanities, post-Marxist theory, and straight up close reading of texts. Interesting because Moretti...
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Time and POV in Alice Munro’s Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship,...
There is nothing genre about Alice Munro. The author and her work are one of the key nodes of modern literary fiction. The perfect detail. The minor epiphany. The mundane realism. Even if you’ve never...
View ArticleTwo lines from Jeff VanderMeer’s Authority
Back when I read Annihilation, the first volume in Jeff VanderMeer’s The Southern Reach Trilogy, I posted the line that hooked me into the novel, that convinced me that I was all in for the ride. I...
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