Literary fiction
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While everyone was falling in and out of love with Kundera in the 1980s, I was learning how to moo like a cow, oink like a pig, baa like a sheep, so you’ll have to forgive me for coming to this, the last of Kundera’s “middle period novels” so late in the game. Fortunately, as…
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Told through four alternating points-of-view, Kundera’s 1967 debut follows the repercussions of a joke told by an undergraduate student in soviet-occupied Czechoslovakian. Kundera draws on three traditions: the senseless labyrinth of fellow Czech writer Franz Kafka, the satirical works produced by citizens of and refugees from the Soviet Union, and the revenge tragedy in which…
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Who is Daniel Quinn? That may be the central mystery in Paul Auster’s first installment of his New York Trilogy, City of Glass. Identity and language are of the utmost importance to the novel from the very beginning, often taking precedence over the stated mystery. Chapter one opens in Quinn’s apartment in “the dead of
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By the end of high school, I’d amassed a respectable library, but more important, I had realized that the key was READING widely and not just owning a lot of books. My reading record began on a word document, that I updated regularly so that I wouldn’t forget about all those books I checked out…
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In 1985, Italian novelist Italo Calvino delivered a series of lectures on the future of the novel at Harvard University. Six Memos for the Next Millennium includes five essays on different topics—lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity—and an unwritten essay on consistency.
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I received my first print publication of a short story last month—six months after my debut novel came out. Go figure! I was always told to focus on the short form before venturing into writing a novel. Read “The Opening of a New Spy Novel by an Author You Love” online at Calliope on the…
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Graham Cavanaugh is on the twelfth year of his second marriage, Audra is his beyond-outgoing wife who works as a graphic designer part-time and may or may not be having an affair, Matthew is their middle-school-aged son with Asperger’s and an obsession with origami, and Elspeth is Graham’s ex-wife, a successful attorney who Audra is
Steven J Kolbe 