“Ethnographic fiction, and all fiction in general, depends on Kierkegaardian leaps of imaginative faith, which is not the same thing as an ‘anything goes’ world in which facts don’t matter.” JT Torres on variation and verisimilitude.
With the impending release of his debut novel, The Step Back, J.T. Bushnell meditates on intersections and departures in our fiction.
Robert L. Shuster examines works of fiction that purport to be real accounts, analyzing how authenticating elements influence our engagement with stories, as well as how these techniques shaped his own debut novel, To Zenzi.
September 8th is National Ampersand Day. J. Alison Rosenblitt on the significance of the ampersand to E.E. Cummings and his poetry, as well as its use in the work of Ocean Vuong.
Author Tim Weed discusses how fiction as a medium differs from other narrative arts like film and television.
“I had been pushing my character, and maybe even my sister, into an ‘other’ box, inadvertently dehumanizing her experience, when what I needed to do instead was bring her into my own head more completely and fold our experiences together.”
“Along the way, listening to writers at my dinner table speak of their work, their contracts, their advances, their sales, their ratings on Amazon, their competitors, etc, I came to realize how much it takes to carve out a career as an author, to live by the pen. At my present age, none of these concerns are mine.” Elena Delbacno discusses the perks of publishing later in life.
“What happened is an anecdote. What someone felt about what happened is a story.”
So many stories I come across may bang around in my head—at best—for a few minutes after I’ve finished them. But I can sit here and recall “A Small Good Thing” in such detail—emotional detail—without even a glance at the text. That’s a well-told story, I’d say.
Some of the most complex and weighty signifiers are brand names, celebrity names, clichés, and propagandist phrases like “axis of evil.” These categories overlap: celebrity names are brand names, brand names are propaganda, propaganda is cliché, etc. “Axis of evil” is a place to start because of its obviousness. No educated person I have met can vocalize this phrase without quotation marks implicit in the vocal texture. What do these quotation marks mean? I think they mean we don’t wish anyone to think we are complicit with the ideology behind the phrase. We use quotation marks to indicate awareness of […]
