Fiction Commons^™

Mind The Gap: And 2 Other Mysteries, Jared Brown

Jared Brown

Mind the Gap, a novel, concerns a murder that occurs in London in 2001. Eight students from a university, accompanied by two faculty members, take a "theatrical tour" of London and Stratford, during which they see and discuss twelve plays. But their tour is ruined when one member of the group is murdered. The two other mysteries in Mind the Gap and 2 Other Mysteries, "The Value of Books" and "Midtown Detectives," are relatively brief -- longer than short stories, but decidedly shorter than novels. They both present intriguing tales of suspense, and both are written in styles …

Training Graduate Assistants, Bryan Bardine

Bryan Bardine

This article was featured in the journal's '4Sites Post-secondary' section. Overall, the goals for summer training are threefold:

• TAs need to become familiar with each other.
• TAs need to be knowledgeable about the material.
• TAs should be somewhat at ease in a classroom environment.

Hermann Hesse’S 'Siddhartha' As Divine Comedy, Bryan Bardine

Bryan Bardine

Comedy has always been more difficult to define and pin down than tragedy. Part of the difficulty may be that comedy is, by its very nature, more protean than tragedy: comedy often takes delight in breaking the rules. Moreover, tragedy has been so memorably described in The Poetics that Aristotle may have unintentionally molded the shape of tragedy through the ages. There are different kinds of tragedy, to be sure, but they are usually variations of a similar theme and form. Perhaps because Aristotle's treatise on comedy has been lost, comedy was left free to develop in numerous ways. In …

Flying Carpets, Hedy Habra

Hedy Habra

Surveying what appears as familiar ground, Hedy Habra's Flying Carpets plunge deep into the bygone and the irrecoverable. Steeped in childhood memories of Egypt and Lebanon, and intensified in the act of fictional recollection, Habra's stories are at once joyous and tragic, witty and profound. In Habra we have a Shehrazad of our times, not one trying to save her life, but one intent to bring enchantment, gravitas, and sensitivity to ours. This is a book full of marvels, beautifully written. --Khaled Mattawa, author of Amorisco and Tocqueville

Hedy Habra's Flying Carpets is a collection of enchantments and wonders charmingly …

The Apocalyptic Adventures Of Private Winfred Scott Biegle, Clifford Davidson

Clifford Davidson

A modernist novel, describing a dystopian military in the imaginary dictatorship of Atlantis, written more than a half century ago when the author was a conscript in the army during the Cold War. As editor of the post newspaper at the Granite City Engineer Depot, Clifford Davidson was in a privileged position for observing the military mentality of the time, in particular the propensity for bullying intended to turn men into mindless killing machines. From other soldiers he was also able to hear disturbing stories at first hand about World War II and the very recent Korean War, only concluded …

Violence And Beauty: Jacques Lacan's 'Antigone', Andrew Slade

Andrew R. Slade

If Jean-Luc Nancy was able to write in "The Sublime Offering," in 1993, that the sublime was fashionable (25), then academic and theoretical tastes have changed, and beauty has come back in style. Throughout the late 1990s, cultural critics and theorists undertook a return to beauty against the fashion for the sublime that returned in twentieth-century theory and philosophy of art in works by Jean-François Lyotard and Theodor Adorno, among others. The interest in the sublime has been grounded in violent historical experience. Not that violence was new, or that the kinds of violence that the twentieth century bequeathed us …

Screenplay: Mark Of The Apprentice, Meredith Doench, Nancy Zafris

Meredith Doench

No abstract provided.

Harley "Hog" Hill, Pamela Herron

Pamela Herron

No abstract provided.

42 Days, Pamela Herron

Pamela Herron

Flash fiction "42 Days" by Pamela Herron was shortlisted for the 2015 Aesthetica Creative Writing Award and published in their Aesthetica Creative Writing Annual 2015.

Contemporary Fiction Panel, H. Rice

H. William Rice

No abstract provided.

Buried, Ryan Cannon

Ryan Cannon

No abstract provided.

The Fast And The Furious, Sharon Lomurno

Sharon L Lomurno

The Fast and the Furious

Wednesday night I had received a tip from Eric Altman of the Pennsylvania Bigfoot Society. The report was coming from an area about 2 hours away from me and he couldn’t get to it and asked if I wanted to take it over. I said heck yeah and I called the witness with the number Eric provided.

The witness claimed he was out in the field walking his dogs when the dogs became frightened and bolted back to the house. He saw a large ape-faced beast pacing back and forth just behind the pines that …

Nelson Bond - Author And Scriptwriter, Lisle G. Brown

Lisle G Brown

An online exhibit devoted to the life and works of Nelson Bond. Bond was a author of fantasy and science fiction, as well as sports and adventures stores, during the hay-day of pulp magazines, the 1930s and 40s. He later turned to radio and television screen wiring during the 1950s and 60s. The exhibit includes an exhaustive listing of his creative works, illustrated by examples of the pulp magazine covers and other visual items. It has still and moving images, as well as a guide to his papers in the Special Collections.

Evolution, Bryan M. Furuness

Bryan M. Furuness

No abstract provided.

The Toys Do Not Speak, Ari M. Mattes

Ari Mattes

Romcom, Ari M. Mattes

Ari Mattes

Best Of The West: New Stories From The Wide Side Of The Missouri, Mitch Wieland

Mitch Wieland

Best of the West: New Stories from the Wide Side of the Missouri is an annual anthology of exceptional short fiction rooted in the western United States. Five award-winning contributors gathered to read from their anthologized work.

The Pump House, Ryan Cannon

Ryan Cannon

No abstract provided.

The Rail, Laurence Minsky, Paul Mccomas

Laurence Minsky

No abstract provided.

True Confections, Katharine Weber

Katharine Weber

Take chocolate candy, add a family business at war with itself, and stir with an outsider’s perspective. This is the recipe for True Confections, the irresistible new novel by Katharine Weber, a writer whose work has won accolades from Iris Murdoch, Madeleine L’Engle, Wally Lamb, and Kate Atkinson, to name a few. Alice Tatnall Ziplinsky’s marriage into the Ziplinsky family has not been unanimously celebrated. Her greatest ambition is to belong, to feel truly entitled to the heritage she has tried so hard to earn. Which is why Zip’s Candies is much more to her than just a candy factory, …

On Tubes, By Ted Stevens, Bryan M. Furuness

Bryan M. Furuness

No abstract available.

Harry Potter And The Academic Conversation, Thomas Burkdall

Thomas Burkdall

No abstract provided.

The Bones Of Hagerman, Mitch Wieland

Mitch Wieland

No abstract provided.

The Prodigal Son, Mitch Wieland

Mitch Wieland

No abstract provided.

Triangle, Katharine Weber

Katharine Weber

By the time she dies at age 106, Esther Gottesfeld, the last survivor of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, has told the story of that day many times. But her own role remains mysterious: How did she survive? Are the gaps in her story just common mistakes, or has she concealed a secret over the years? As her granddaughter seeks the real story in the present day, a zealous feminist historian bears down on her with her own set of conclusions, and Esther's voice vies with theirs to reveal the full meaning of the tragedy.

A brilliant chronicle of the event …

'Food, Precious Food: Migrating The Palate', Merlinda C. Bobis

Merlinda Bobis

No abstract provided.

Swan In Retreat, Mitch Wieland

Mitch Wieland

No abstract provided.

The Little Women, Katharine Weber

Katharine Weber

Sisters Meg, Jo and Amy have the perfect family--loving, creative parents; a comfortable life on Manhattan's Upper West Side; a future full of possibility. Perfect until the daughters discover their mother has had affair, and, even worse, that their father has forgiven her. Shattered by their parents' failure to live up to the moral standards and values of the family, the two younger sisters leave New York and move to Meg's apartment in New Haven, where Meg is a junior at Yale. It is here that the girls will form their own family, divorced from their parents. The Little Women …

The Music Lesson, Katharine Weber

Katharine Weber

"She's beautiful," writes Irish-American art historian Patricia Dolan in the first of the journal entries that form The Music Lesson. "I look at my face in the mirror and it seems far away, less real than hers."

The woman she describes is the subject of the stolen Vermeer of the novel's title. Patricia is alone with this exquisite painting in a remote Irish cottage by the sea. How she arrived in such an unlikely circumstance is one part of the story Patricia tells us: about her father, a policeman who raised her to believe deeply in the cause of a …

Objects In Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear, Katharine Weber

Katharine Weber

Already excerpted in The New Yorker, Katherine Weber's witty first novel of attraction and deception, a tale with the sensibility of a Margaret Atwood, pulses with cultural references and word games that echo Nabokov.