Post-modernism
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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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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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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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I first began reading this anthology (or perhaps I should say “attempted to read”) a little over a year ago. I thought it would be a good book to breeze through while teaching from home because of COVID. I was wrong. About the breezing, at least. While I was immediately met with authors I have
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“Context is everything. Dress me up and see. I’m a carnival barker, an auctioneer, a downtown performance artist, a speaker in tongues, a senator drunk on filibuster. I’ve got Tourette’s. My mouth won’t quit, though mostly I whisper or subvocalize like I’m reading aloud, my Adam’s apple bobbing, jaw muscle beating like a miniature heart…
Steven J Kolbe 