Showing posts with label short stories. Show all posts
Showing posts with label short stories. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 27, 2016

2 street scenes + a story crossing


It's one week now that we are here, on Lanzarote island. The weather is still good. In the next days, there might be some clouds, but also sun. And the internet is back! It was down since Monday evening, a reminder to take nothing for granted. So here's the next post, inspired by the current photofriday theme "Street Scenes".

The photo on top is my favourite street here, when it comes to street names: Avenida de los Volcanoes - Vulcanoe Avenue.

And from the files, another interesting street scene: Sokrates lives here.



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Being offline had a good side effect, or maybe it was just a coincidence in time - but this morning I thought about one of my resolutions for this year, to revisit stories I have written. And an idea surfaced, one that is so simple that I wonder why I didn't think of it before:

Each week, I like the way the new photofriday theme makes me go and look for that theme, either in a new photo, or in my photo files. And following those themes, I might simply switch folder, and look for a fitting story. So the revisiting would have a fixed place and theme.

Here's the one for this week, for "Street Scene".

I still remember how that story happened, in winter, while driving and musing, and seeing those scenes along the way:

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City Crossing  

Cars going. Cars coming. Cars whizzing through the night, in endless streams, forming a line of red leading inwards, a line of white leading outwards. On the side of a four lane road, a house with three towers and silver roof, fully alit, shining like an ufo that fell from the sky. The door, wide open. But no one there, at the door, in the rooms behind the countless windows. A life size still life.

In town, mazes of metal, of stone. Two yellow buses crossing on a bridge, in the very moment the traffic light underneath them turns green. Three trees on the left side, remnants of the time before asphalt. Prisoners of the city, they are. There is no way out for them, not to the left, not to the right. So they stand. Reaching for the sky with their black arms.

At the train station, a sign saying Agra. As if it was close. As if it wasn't two continents away. Between a media maxistore and a company called clockhouse: a plastic half moon, dangling in the air, accompanied by pink and green stars.

At a crossing, a woman in a long white coat. On the other side of the street, a guy in an orange jacket. Maybe their eyes will meet, for a moment, while they cross to the other side. Maybe we all met, somewhere, in between streets.


Saturday, June 20, 2015

reading while driving: Laos, Vietnam, Australia, Pacific Crest Trail, Armenia, Morocco....


Reading this week: reads to drive along to. Since this week, I have to drive about 1 to 1,5 hours on a route that often comes with traffic jams, and the destination isn't that great either: to the hospital and back, each day of the week, for 7 weeks. To make that drive less frustrating, I now revived my old e-book reader. Which comes with a really nice feature: it has an audio setting. So it can read stories and books to me while I drive. Works pretty well, and makes the drive easier. To add some spin to that, the idea is to read stories and books from different countries.

Here are the books and stories I read this week, and the places they took me to:

LAOS, VIETNAM, AUSTRALIA...

"Scared to Life: A Memoir Paperback" by Jillian Webster
This is a beautiful and reflective memoir of a long world trip, a trip that leads from Europe to Asia, and to Australia. What I enjoy is the mix of places, some I know and been to myself: Ireland, France, Switzerland, Italy...and also the South-Asian loop: Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand. Reading those chapters brings back my own memories of travelling in South Asia, while the chapter about Australia takes me to a continent I've never been to myself.
Beyond the places, the book includes the time before and after the journey, which gives the book a larger horizon. Here's the summary: "After years of heartache, she walks away from the Jehovah's Witnesses, losing her family forever. Forging ahead with nothing but her backpack, Jillian sets out on a global journey across Europe, Africa, Southeast Asia and Australia in search of the life she risked all for."
Jillian Webster also has a website about her travels and the book: scaredtolife.net

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PACIFIC CREST TRAIL

"Thru-Hiking Will Break Your Heart" 
Another book I came across while browsing and searching for good "driving" reads is about a long-distance hike. Carrot Quinn is a long distance hiker, and like Cheryl Strayed with her memoir “Wild”, she wrote a book about her trail experience – and now is blogging from another trail. I started to read her current blog entries, and now bought the memoir "Thru-Hiking Will Break Your Heart", which starts near the border of Mexico and leads to Canada.


So far, I never hiked long-distance, but I once did long bike rides, including a marathon. And I have fond memories of going for short hikes in the French Alps, stunned by the way the scenery keeps changing every couple of minutes. Above is a photo from one of those hikes.

Just reading about being out there and reaching out to the horizon brings a freshness to the day. Plus, I hadn't thought about it when ordering, but some unexpected parallels between those long hikes, and long times of treatment come to mind: that you need to keep going, and get up each morning. That it's not comfortable, but that you do it anyway. That no one can take that walk for you, but that there is a solidarity growing between you and all other who are on that walk. And that there is, somewhere in the distance, the point that waits to be reached.

If you want to read a bit of the hike, Carrot Quinn's website is "Dispatches from the wild". She also  blogs there from her current hike.

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Next to the books, I read some short stories - and just looking for interenational  short stories was interesting.

ARMENIA
When looking for a story from Armenia, I arrived at a new online magazine: The Amenite, which is "an online media outlet of Armenian news, culture, politics, society, and history, with showcases of art and literature,"

Here are two links from it, the first is an essay on language and storytelling, and the second is a short story that reaches from Syria to Armenia and the US:

MOROCCO
The same happened when I looked for stories from Morocco: I arrived at an online magazine of Moroccan writing. “al-hakawati Arab Cultural Trust is an independent non-profit educational organization. Management and staff are located in Beirut, Lebanon, and New Jersey, USA. al-hakawati is the Arabic word for “the storyteller”. They feature an online anthology of Moroccan stories called "The Moroccan Dream". The first dream is a dream about writing and stortelling: The Interpretation of Dreams

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Global Reading Challenge 2015 + Currently Reading:

For 2015, I try to read books / authors from different countries, the idea is to visit all continents. Here's more about that plan: 7 Continents, 7 Billion People, 7 Books.

In a previous book post, I put together some reading statistics and book memories of 2014 - so if you are into geeky reading statistics, try this link: A year in reading in geek statistics +  book memories

For more reading notes, click here: life as a journey with books. A reading list by regions is online at: World Reads by country


Friday, August 22, 2014

Reading the World: from New York to Berlin, with stopovers in Antigua, Ethiopia, Sri Lanka...


This summer, I am taking a trip around the world in short stories (more here: reading the missing parts of the world). The current destinations are: the Granta "Travel" issue, the New Yorker Fiction Podcast, and a Berlin collection.

Granta Travel
Published in summer 2013, the Granta travel collection is refreshing and different, offering unusual places, and an unusual stories. Here's the official note:
"From the Amazon to rural China, west Texas to the caves that lurk beneath the Peak District, this issue of Granta takes you out of your chair and out into the world. Haruki Murakami goes home to Kobe, Teju Cole meditates on danger in Lagos and Lina Wolff imagines a woman adrift in Madrid. Here are eighteen collisions between people and the places that have made them, shaped them and terrified them."
And here's the online page with excerpts of several of the stories and additional texts: Granta Travel

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The New Yorker Fiction Podcast
It was during one of my online searches for international short stories that I arrived at the New Yorker Fiction Podcast page. I almost klicked away, then tried one of the podcasts - and then returned there several times. Such a great format and series. The podcast include both the stories and a talk about them. Here are some of the international talks / stories, with extra links:

New Zealand
Miranda July reads Janet Frame's short story “Prizes
"Life is hell but at least there are prizes. Or so one thought..." (Janet Frame Blog)

Antigua
Edwidge Danticat  reads 2 stories by Jamaica Kincaid: "Girl” and “Wingless
"Wash the white clothes on Monday and put them on the stone heap; wash the color clothes on Tuesday and put them on the clothesline to dry; don't walk barehead in the hot sun;..." (story + interview with J. Kincaid)

Chile
Francisco Goldman reads Roberto Bolaño’s short story “Clara"
"Sometimes, when I’m alone and can’t get to sleep but don’t feel up to switching on the light, I think of Clara, who came in second in that beauty contest..." (& a user's guide to Bolano)

Argentine 
Hisham Matar reads “Shakespeare’s Memory” by Jorge Luis Borges
"This story, which is one of the last that Borges wrote, is a meditation on the mind, understanding, and inspiration—and it draws on the author’s deep erudition..."

Israel 
Jonathan Safran Foer reads Amos Oz’s “The King of Norway”
"Zvi Provizor loved to convey bad news: earthquakes, plane crashes, buildings collapsing on their occupants, fires, and floods. He read the papers and listened to all the news broadcasts very early in the morning... (story link)

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Berlin Metropole 
Parallel to the Granta Travel collection, i am reading a Berlin collection - this is another of the surprise treats telephone book box. The collection was published in 1999, and features stories and essays from the re-united and new / old capital Berlin, and was very timely back then with stories on Berlin turning to a huge building site, and the shift of the capital from Bonn back to Berlin, covering moments and views from the German reunification in 1990 to the capital shift that happened in 1999.

Unfortunately, there is no online page for the book, and no english versions of the stories. So no direct links to share from it, but it made me go and revisit my own memories of being in Berlin: "Four Berlins, or: I am (t)here"

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The New Yorker Fiction Archive
And more reads, leading from Berlin back to New York and onwards: listening to the New Yorker Podcast and following the links included, I arrived in Haiti and Sri Lanka, in Ethiopia and Norway:

Haiti
Edwidge Danticat: "Ghosts"
"Pascal Dorien was living in Bel Air—the Baghdad of Haiti, some people called it, but that would be Cité Pendue, an even more destitute and brutal neighborhood, where hundreds of middle-school children entering a national art contest drew M-16s and beheaded corpses. Bel Air was actually a mid-level slum.."

Sri Lanka
Romesh Gunesekra: "Roadkill"
"The first night I stayed in Kilinochchi I was a little apprehensive. Most of us living in the south of Sri Lanka had come to think of this town as the nerve center of terror..."

Ethiopia
Dinaw Mengestu: "The Paper Revolution"
"When Isaac and I first met, at the university, we both pretended that the campus and the streets of the capital were as familiar to us as the dirt paths of the rural villages where we had grown up and lived until only a few months earlier..."

Norway
Karl Ove Knausgaard: "Come Together"
"I was almost twelve years old, going into the fifth year of barneskole..."

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Links + More

Reading the world:  the collected list of stories is online here: global reading, and a note on the reading journey can be found here:  reading the (missing parts of) the world 




Saturday, July 26, 2014

International Flash Fiction Competition + Disobedient Objects



It was sunny most of the week, and now it's the weekend - and rain.... but at least the rain brought 2 good web surprises this morning:

A Virtual Museum for Dialogue & an International 20K Flash Fiction Competition 
While looking for international short stories for my summer reading challenge, i came across the page of the Museo de la Palabra, a musuem that "supports and encourages dialogue between different cultures, ideas, religions and sensibilities. The result and the existence of this dialogue is in itself a museum piece, and configure as a meeting place, the unique virtual museum in the world in which nothing is exposed.."

The museum organizes micro fiction contests - in the third edition, authors from 119 countries participated (map), the stories are online here: Flash Fiction Competetion III

And now the next edition of the contest is open: the slogan is: "Mandela: Words and Concord", stories must not exceed 100 words, first price is 20.000$ (!), the competition ends on November 23rd, visit the webpage for the Short Story Competitin Guidelines + Participation Form.

Disobedient Objects 
London's news magazine The Guardian wrote about a thought-provoking new exhibition that opened its doors: “Tools of protest: Disobedient Objects, the V&A's subversive new show” – when I read it, I thought “V&A” must be an avantgarde gallery, but it turns out it’s a place I’ve been to myself once: “The Victoria and Albert Museum, London, is the world's largest museum of decorative arts and design”. Here is the link to the article: Disobedient Objects 

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Extra Links


The summer reading challenge: reading the (missing parts of) the world 

More disobedience: photos of "Disobedient Objects"

More reading notes in this blog: life as a journey with books



Wednesday, May 28, 2014

reading: Fragile Things & Too Much Happiness



currently reading: short fictions. by two excellent writers: Neil Gaiman and Alice Munro. sounds like counterparts, but actually some of the stories almost overlap in atmosphere and in the open and in the way they dare to look and delve deeper into those darker areas of the human mind. Happiness - it is a fragile thing, both in Munro's book, and in Gaiman's.

Here are the official book descriptions:

Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders
Marvelous creations and more — including a short story set in the world of The Matrix, and others set in the worlds of gothic fiction and children's fiction—can be found in this extraordinary collection, which showcases Gaiman's storytelling brilliance as well as his terrifyingly entertaining dark sense of humor. By turns delightful, disturbing, and diverting, Fragile Things is a gift of literary enchantment from one of the most unique writers of our time. (Fragile Things at Goodreads)

Too much Happiness
A compelling, provocative—even daring—collection. Ten superb new stories by the winner of the 2009 Man Booker International Prize (and winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize for Literature) . With clarity and ease, Alice Munro once again renders complex, difficult events and emotions into stories that shed light on the unpredictable ways in which men and women accommodate and often transcend what happens in their lives.

Short stories..
...didn't expect this at all, but one of Munro's story has a strong meta layer. Its title gives more than a hint: "Fiction". It's about life, the world, a writer, and .. short stories. This is glorious, especially in retrospect:
Joyce has never understood this business of lining up to get a glimpse of the author and then going away with a stranger’s name written in your book. She doesn't even know if she will read the book. She has a couple of good biographies on the go at the moment that she is sure are more to her taste than this will be. How Are We to Live is a collection of short stories, not a novel. This in itself is a disappointment. It seems to diminish the book’s authority, making the author seem like somebody who is just hanging on to the gates of Literature, rather than safely settled inside.
I blogged about Munro before, with more context and links, and with this lovely moment from the bookfair, at the day when the Nobel Prize for Literature for her was announced - and seeing her (short story!) books there, bodyguarded: Reading notes: Alice Munro 

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Currently Reading + More Reads:

For 2014, i didn't join a specific reading challenge, but i try to read books / authors from different countries and continents, and also follow the “readwomen2014” initiative. Here’s more about it: 2014 - year of reading women

For more reading notes in this blog, click here: life as a journey with booksand a reading list by regions is online at: World Reads by country

Other book blog and their current reads: It's Monday! What are you reading? (join by blogging and adding your link)

Monday, July 15, 2013

a short trip around the world: road stories, global stories, new voices & Kafka + Wallace

This blog post is inspired by the general joy of global reading, short stories, a blog series, roads, and an online lit course. More, at the bottom of this post.




The reads of the last days were ... short.
 After reading the Granta collection "Pakistan" in spring (here's more), I now tried 2 Granta collections, both with global themes, but very different: "On the Road Again" is about travel and travel writing, and "Ten Years Later" refers to September 11 - which brought some familiar voices from recent reads. Here are the short descriptions:

Granta 116: Ten Years Later
A street vendor in Tunisia, an American marine going home and a signals operator on a North Korean fishing trawler. From the battlefields of Afganistan to the streets of Mogadishu and Toronto, these are just a few of the stories in the issue of Granta that conjure the complexity and sorrow of life since 11 September 2001.

Granta 94: On the Road Again
Where travel writing went next with fiction from Michel Faber and Tessa Hadley, Tim Parks on commuting in Italy and James Hamilton-Paterson on "The End of Travel". - The collection starts with "We went to Saigon" by Tia Willmann. From there, it leads to Ukraine & Montana, Spain & Portugal, and through Russia. in an photo essay across eleven time zones, just to name a few of the destinations.

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New Voices: "In Transit" by Dina Nayeri + "Runs Girl" by Chinelo Okparanta
Both collections are from previous years. Visiting the Granta page i saw that they currently have their "New Voices" series on again - a series that highlights emerging talents on granta.com. The ones that touched me most were Dina Nayeri with "In Transit" - the story of a family that moves from Tehran to Oklahoma -

and Chinelo Okparanta with ‘Runs Girl’, which tells of a student in Nigeria, Ada, that tells about the other side of internet fraud: "Her primary patrons were the Yahoo Boys, she told me. I had seen many fancy-looking young men around campus, but I had just assumed that they came from wealth. It had not crossed my mind until that visit with Njideka that many of them built their wealth off internet fraud."

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#StorySunday
Following the short story mood, i joined storysunday again, the open twitter story link exchange, here's more: storysunday, and here's the twitter stream: #storysunday.

One of the chance finds of it was this story from Electric Literature:

Three Things You Should Know About Peggy Paula
"One. In high school Peggy Paula worked as a waitress at the Perkins. Night shifts were her favorite, kids from her school would come in after games or dances with bleary eyes and messy hair and Peggy Paula knew they’d been drinking and smoking those flimsy joints she’d see them passing, the girls with smudged makeup and rat’s nests in the back of their heads, proud unblinking eyes, scanning the dining room like I dare you...."

Kafka & David Foster Wallace 
Later, while browsing onwards from there, i arrived at a call for a special David Foster Wallace issue at Found Poetry Review, and looking for Wallace stories online, I arrived at a page that is like a gate itself: "Open Culture". So good to find this list of 30 stories and Essays by David Foster Wallace

And again, in a nice twist in themes, one of the links is an essay from Wallace on Kafka - one of the authors that is featured in the Fiction of Relationships, so I recently read one of his works.. and now read Wallace's take on Kafka:

Laughing with Kafka
"What Kafka's stories have, rather, is a grotesque and gorgeous and thoroughly modem complexity. Kafka's humor-not only not neurotic but anti-neurotic, heroically sane-is, finally, a religious humor, but religious in the manner of Kierkegaard and Rilke and the Psalms, a harrowing spirituality... And it is this, I think, that makes Kafka's wit inaccessible to children whom our culture has trained to see jokes as entertainment and entertainment as reassurance."

A short trip around the world, those reads created together, one leading to the other.

*****

Book Links, Previous Reads & Finding Books


Previous reading blog entries are collected here: bookshelf: currently  reading... there also is a visual bookshelf, just click it to get there.

Reading around the world - i really enjoy this literal discovery-tour of the world, and it now made me go and pull some useful links together in a blog post: Finding books by country: helpful links + resources

More monday reads from other bloggers: link list at book journey

And my own book... is Worl(d)s Apart. True.

Monday, July 8, 2013

reading: Blue Hours + Yellow + (non)-Fairy Tales + film critics by Hulk

This blog post is inspired by the general joy of global reading, a blog series, a new online lit course and a reading challenge. More, at the bottom of this post.



This week's reads indeed are old and new, borrowed and blue...

Blue
I went to the library a couple of days ago, browsing books and hoping to find the right read without being able to name it - and found it: "Blue Nights" by Joan Didion, which is titled "Blue Hours" in German.
It’s a book that is both melancholic and so full of life: the whole book is a life reflection, non-fiction, a dealing with growing older, and being the one left of the family she and her husband and their adopted daughter were.

Here's a quote that sums up the theme and mood:
“Vanish.
Pass into nothingness: the Keats line that frightened her.
Fade as the blue nights fade, go as the brightness goes.
Go back into the blue. I myself placed her ashes in the wall.
I myself saw the cathedral doors locked at six.
I know what it is I am now experiencing.
I know what the frailty is, I know what the fear is.
The fear is not for what is lost.
What is lost is already in the wall.
What is lost is already behind the locked doors.
The fear is for what is still to be lost.”
 ― Joan Didion, Blue Nights
For more about the book, and more quotes, try the Goodreads page: Blue Nights 

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Yellow
From color, Didion's "Blue" book reminded me of a book i have here since a while: "Yellow" by Don Lee, a book of short stories that are interconnect in a fictional city, and all circle the theme of immigration / culture / race from different angles. Don Lee's family is from South Korea, and he lived both in Seoul and in Tokyo as a child, and now lives in Boston. The book is called “Yellow”, and of course, comes with a yellow cover. so it’s blue yellow reads for this weekend.
Not an easy read, but intense and human, the stories form a window and sometimes a door into being someone who has no easy, single answer to the question: "Where are you from?" and "What are you?" - someone who is called with the words "'ello, 'ello", and thinks the other means "Hello" - until the understanding sinks in that the 'ello is mocking him as "yellow". -

The most important painful question the book poses probably is: how to deal with a world that comes with prejudices, and how not to let those prejudices narrow your world view, and start to be the theme of your days, turn into the narrative of your life story. Which is masterfully done, by stories that circle exactly this narrative.

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Fairy Tales
While looking for some web link, I came across a story again that remained in my mind since the first time I read it, a story that is set in Haiti, and like Yellow, opens a window into another world: "Things I Know About Fairy Tales" by Roxane Gay is an exceptional non-fairy-tale-story that also is about what we weave into the narrative of our life, and what we pull out:
"Once upon a time, not long ago, I was kidnapped and held captive for thirteen days. Shortly after I was freed, my mother told me there was nothing to be learned from what had happened to me. She told me to forget the entire incident because there was no moral to the story."
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Hulk Film Critic, or: The importance of Story and Character
And now, a very different read: an essay on modern superhero movies. Which, in fact, is an essay on much more: it's a reflection on story, character, the ethos of blockbusterdome, fakes, growth and truth.

It's written by Hulk. And it starts with this neat introduction:

PART ONE - A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE INTRODUCTIONS 
PLEASE NOTE: THIS ESSAY HAS FOUR DIFFERENT INTRODUCTIONS. SORRY BOUT THAT, IT'S JUST THAT WE'RE ULTIMATELY GOING TO NEED THEM ALL.
...and includes priceless passages on mankind and subjectivity like this on:
BUT WHILE EVERYONE IS CERTAINLY ENTITLED TO THEIR OPINION THAT DOES NOT MEAN THAT EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO THEIR OPINION BEING RIGHT
Don't get tricked by the all-capital sentences, or by the title. By the way, a good way to read it, is to copy it and read it on an e-book reader.

Film Critic Hulk Smash: The importance of dramatizing character


*****

Book Links, Previous Reads & Finding Books


Previous reading blog entries are collected here: bookshelf: currently  reading... there also is a visual bookshelf, just click it to get there.

Reading around the world - i really enjoy this literal discovery-tour of the world, and it now made me go and pull some useful links together in a blog post: Finding books by country: helpful links + resources

More monday reads from other bloggers: link list at book journey

And my own book... is Worl(d)s Apart. True.

Tuesday, June 25, 2013

global reading: books from South Korea + flash stories from around the world

This blog post is inspired by the general joy of global reading, a blog series, a new online lit course and a reading challenge. More, at the bottom of this post.



Reading into South Korea
After Belgium, the next destination of the Around the World Reading Challenge is: South Korea! So I went and looked for books from / or set in South Korea, and returned to the novel that won the Man Asia Literary Prize in 2012:

"Please Look After Mother" by Kyung-Sook Shin
A wonderful, fascinating and multi-faceted read - The novel tells a family story that spans two generations. It is set in Seoul city and in a Korean village, and told from the perspectives of daughter, son, husband, and the missing mother. A powerful book about secrets, lifes, and the changing times. This was the first book I read from South Korea, so that was double interesting, together with the larger view this novel gave on the change from the more traditional attitudes of the older generation to the modern attitudes of the younger generation, and also the difference betweewn countryside and city. Here's an example, the view of the mother (who always put her husband and children first), and the view of the daughter: 

"The apartments and studios that your siblings live in (in Seoul) all look the same to me. It's confusing which house is whose. How can everything be exactly the same? How do they all live in identical spaces like that?"
(Mother to daughter when she visits her in Seoul)

She takes out a notebook from her bag, opens it at a particular page. On it were thirty sentences starting with "I". - "Last New Year's Eve, I worte down what I wanted to do with my life, other than writing. Just for fun."
(description and lines from daughter, from a meeting with the brother)

The book also includes elements of magic realism, as well as reflections based on a karma, which gives an understanding for the different cultural and world view, here's an example:
"Do you think that things happening now are linked to things from the past and things in the future, it's just that we can't feel them? ... Sometimes when I look at my grandchildren I think they were dropped down from somewhere out of the blue, and that they have nothing to do with me. Nothing to do with me at all."
And interesting: it was only now, while copying those lines after re-reading, that I noticed this counterpart of the link between generations going missing: just as the children can't find their mother any more, the mother feels she has lost the connection to her children and grandchildren, that they aren't a continuation of the family tree.

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Kimchi with Everything by John Mayston:
The other book I read from Korea had waited in my e-reader, only that i didn't realize this until i tried and searched it for "Korea", which created a neat list of all text lines that include the word. That's how I arrived at this e-book I once downloaded, which happens to be set in South Korea: Kimchi with Everything by John Mayston. It's written by John Mayston, who was based in a small town in South Korea and kept a diary that includes his trips in Korea, where he visited Seoul several times, and the Demilitarized zone, and the countryside, and even spent a weekend at a monastry. His year also included a week-long stay in Tokyo.  too.

Written in a casual tone, and moving through all seasons, and from teaching to travelling, it covers a lot of everyday impressions and shows the different faces of Korea. This passage is from the arrival day, when he is picked up at the airport and driven to his school and new home:

"Land for housing is at a premium in South Korea as it is one of the most densely populated countries in the world. As we drove along the road, it was no surprise to see that the majority of the populations of Koreans living in high rise buildings. Paddy fields were the other main feature of the journey but these were lifeless at this time of the year as the autumn harvest had already passed by."

And Kimchi? That's a popular Korean dish.

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Reading about South Korea and the border to North Korea also brought back memories and impressions of an exhibition i visited in Vienna - the MAK museum ("museum for applied art") featured the theme exhibitions "Flowers For Kim Il Sung" while I was in Vienna. I hadn't know about the exhibition before, but when arriving there with my friedns, we go curious, and entered it.

The exhibition came with security check and an introduction on the debate around the exhibition (some noted that the posters and paintings and other items, which formed: "Flowers for Kim Il Sung - Art and architecture from the Democratic People's Republic of Korea" could be interpreted as propaganda itself, while others pointed out that this actually is showing life in Norh Korea. While walking through the exhibition, we both wonder: "How would my life - or rather: I - have shaped out if I was born somewhere else, like for example, in North Korea?" - Very different, that's for sure.
(here's more about the trip to Vienna)

 It's a question that probably is more present while travelling, while being/living in another place for a bit.

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Flash Stories



Flash Mob 2013 is a hybrid blog carnival and competition celebrating flash fiction in general, and the International Flash Fiction Day on June 22. More than 100 authors followed the called, and leaped. Wrote. And blogged their stories.

Links to the stories are now online at: Flash Mob 2013 - click the different continent links on top, and then click on the author images to get to the story - here are the shortcuts:

some story suggestions:


*****

Book Links, Previous Reads & Finding Books


Previous reading blog entries are collected here: bookshelf: currently  reading... there also is a visual bookshelf, just click it to get there.

Reading around the world - i really enjoy this literal discovery-tour of the world, and it now made me go and pull some useful links together in a blog post: Finding books by country: helpful links + resources

More monday reads from other bloggers: link list at book journey

And my own book... is Worl(d)s Apart. True.

Sunday, June 9, 2013

open sky + animals in the city + Marrakech



open sky
2 days late, but a sky photo after all for sky friday: the blue horizon after the rain.

animals in the city
from nature to city: catching up with qarrtsiluni's "Animals in the City" issue, i arrived at a great & unsettling short story: "Animals" by Liz N. Clift:

"When the first goat came into Jasper’s — it walked on its hind legs — we thought it was a joke, something we could talk about at our day jobs. When the second one came in, we stopped scattering topping on pizzas, and stared...."

Marrakech blue
and i was in Marrakech this morning for some colored moments – when browsing blogs, i was amazed by this place, by the shade of blue: Color Me Blue, Majorelle Blue, in Marrakech



Friday, August 13, 2010

5000 years - #fridayflash

today, it's writing initiatives crossing over:
  • in Daily s-Press, there is a special writing feature on #fridayflash - a twitter-based stoy share+spread, based on the hashtag #fridayflash.
  • in 52/250 A Year of Flash, the theme for this week is: Space Camp. the story i wrote for it is "5000 Years". the Space Camp issue went live today - [it's seriously amazing. take a step into Space here in 52/250] - and parallel, i now post the story here, to join #fridayflash.
  • enjoy & if you have a story to share: join! both #fridayflash and 52/250 are open to newcomers. the next 52/250 theme is "Can't Wait", due on Sunday. #fridayflash happens every Friday.
  • and now... the story. which matches the theme: it reaches back to the first written signs, and then rolls toward the future.
--------------------------


5000 Years

She had been warned. On first glance, this species seemed like another average task: anthropoid, medium-brained, clueless about any realm beyond the third dimension.

She observed them from the camp her ancestors had put up on Mars aeons ago, when the first earthlings had reached the level of rudimentary writing. That had been 5000 years ago.
By now, the earthlings were roaming the stage of basic technology. Fascinated by mechanics and speed, they had managed to burn 67 percent of their planet’s resources, and were still eager to go faster. Every now and then, they built giant telescopes, then ended up frustrated as neither aliens nor antimatter could be found, despite all their hopes and their piles of astrophysical equations.

Parallel to observing them, she read through the reports of those who had gone on ground missions before her. Many hadn’t returned. Some had turned to humans, some had died as martyrs, some still were there, trying to prevent the worst.

Weirdlings, she had named them secretly. Now, while preparing for her own ground mission, she had to confess that she was both appalled and fascinated by them, by their overly occupation with dialects, frontiers, and hair lengths; their hopeless love for the nature they slowly killed; their longing to travel the world and the universe, to find peace, and recreate paradise, somehow.

“Don’t fall for them,” her commander reminded her again before she was beamed down.

---------
related links: short stories , 52/250 and 24/7

Tuesday, August 3, 2010

my name in unexpected places + #StorySunday


my name appeared in 2 unexpected places - i copied and pasted the notes, and also included the details of StorySunday, to spread the word (+ stories):

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Editions Bibliotekos, Thursday, July 29, 2010Virtual Notes Marks Common Boundary
Have you seen Dorothee Lang's virtual notes on
Common Boundary? Take a look here - she gets right to the heart of the book. And no wonder, as Dorothee is a writer, essayist, editor, and translator. When you go to her virtual notes, you can find out more about her. Check it out. (link)

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Tania Writes, Monday, August 02, 2010The First Story Sunday on Twitter
After leaving Facebook a few months ago, I've been using and enjoying Twitter much more than before, for its simplicity (no farmville, no distracting games!) and its usefulness, with people posting links to interesting and relevant articles, blog posts etc... Yesterday, I decided to start something up and see what happened: #StorySunday.
The idea behind #StorySunday is that you link to a short story by somebody else that you've enjoyed recently. For those of you who missed this and you are on Twitter, you can go and search for StorySunday. But I thought I'd also post all the stories people recommended here, so everyone can enjoy them, along with the name of those who Tweeted:
:)

Friday, April 2, 2010

Fictionaut April Fools' Challenge (or: cockroaches and monkeys)



"the challenge: write a story (or poem) with the words: “just kidding” in them somewhere. the deadline: April Fool’s Day."

it is done. the challenge line crossed. and the stories... are all up here: April Fool's Day Stories

  • the winning story is "Cockroach" by Susan Tepper
  • runner-up (or: climber-up) is my monkey story: "Going Bananas"
  • closely followed by Finnegan Flawnt's "Flatulence"

to celebrate the april stories, there is a special "Fictionaut Faves: April Fools' Edition" - it also includes this short feature i wrote:

"My favorite April Fool’s Day Challenge story? – Good question. There were so many great stories with brilliant lines and surprise takes on “just kidding”. The story that kept pinching me, though, was “April 1, 2013” by Susan Gibb, this neat + cruel story of a man who wakes in hospital to the (fake) news that he has lain unconscious for 3 years.

How far would people go for a joke? That’s what I discussed with a friend some days later, and retold the April 2013 story from memory. My friend commented with a (modern) german saying: “Lieber einen Freund verlieren als einen guten Witz auslassen” – “Rather lose a friend than skip a good joke.”


parallel to the fictionaut favs, Kevin Myrick, who hosted the challenge, wrote short reviews for almost all participating texts. here's what he said about "Going Bananas":

"I wasn’t too sure what to think at first about Dorothee Lang’s “Going Bananas.” At first, I had the thought in mind it was one of those pseudo-ridiculous-but-funny stories that editors love more than they should nowadays.
But then something struck me as I read her piece. It was a little voice in the back of my head asking me “what is it about this story?” I’ll tell you what it is. It’s lifelike. It all seems insane yet real, chocked full of little details. NYPD Blue. Milkshakes. Life on the run. Maybe I liked it so much because I could see it in a Quentin Tarantino film."


to which Finnegan Flawnt added: "like the tarantino thought, great review. this was a hell of a good story, just crazy enough and well crafted."

the whole list of reviews is up here: April Day Challenge 2010 + reviews (Kevin: big thanks for getting all this together!)

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

MillionWriters + FictionDaily



stories + stories + more stories:

the storySouth Million Writers award is open for nominations - eligible are short stories that got published in 2009, with a wordcount of minimum 1000 words. the nominations lists are a treat on their own, here the direct links: the editor nominations list, and the reader nominations list.

and there's a new webpage: FictionDaily. great simple concept: a short, a long, and a genre story per day, "good stuff to read in places you wouldn't normally look." no author names, no magazine names, just the words for starters. here the link: FictionDaily.
.

Sunday, October 4, 2009

overcast / space / stillness



october. and it still feels like late summer.

here, 3 sunday-terrace-reads of today:

- The Movement to Stillness, another reflection from Ajahn Sucitto, which made me want to keep that passage, to put it in my pocket for later: "Relationships are about being willing to relate; that’s all. They’re not about always living in agreement and never being separated. Bodies are for being embodied in, not for looking beautiful, being painless or staying young."

- Voyage Back into Space / Ethan Bernard, from the new eclectica issue, which comes with a fascinating extraterrestrial photo series: images of the Mars surface.

- Overcast / Aaron Burch, from Memorious. a winter story, which made me cherish the late-summer-sun double, together with the solitary sunday clouds: "I wished, when the clouds had still been around, I’d been able to grab one out of the sky, keep a little piece for myself. I did that sometimes, kept things, put them in my pocket for later."

~

Sunday, September 20, 2009

sunday reads



despite the forecast, a sunny day. i look for a book to read, then browse short stories instead. and come across a brilliant one in Agni online. print the first 2 pages, to read outside. then print it all.

'Obituary' by Ihab Hassan - a story about a restaurant critic. or rather, a story about eating, living, and dying. here is some: "Oysters, carrot tops, tiger testicles, mandrake roots . . . poppycock! We eat, fuck, and die. Death, not Knowledge, knowledge of death perhaps, came with a bite of that first apple."

in contrast to that (or in counterpart), i browsed 'Happy Days' - a blog the NewYorkTimes initiated after the economic downturn, as a discussion forum about the search for contentment in its many forms. a story from there: 'Self, Meditating' by Robert Wright - a reflection on a meditation retreat. or rather, a story about succeeding, and failing, and .. eating: "What I hated above all was that I wasn’t succeeding as a meditator. Now, as the two leaders of this retreat were known to point out, you’re not supposed to think of “succeeding” at meditating. And you’re not supposed to blame yourself for failing. And blah, blah, blah.
And what was “success” like? Well, to start at the less spiritual, more sensual end: By the time I left, eating the food I’d initially disdained ranked up there with above-average sex..."


~

Thursday, September 10, 2009

the short review



'The Short Review' is all about short story collections, and isn't short at all:
Each monthly issue of The Short Review brings you original reviews of new, not-quite-so-new and classic collections and anthologies, written by reviewers many of whom are also short story writers themselves and who love short fiction.

so good that someone turned on this spotlight.
here the link: the short review
the review also has a blog: the short review blog

nice suprise: i noticed the review of "Repetition Patterns" from Ben Tanzer, which i read this spring. so i clicked the review link, and popping up at the bottom was: a link to BluePrintReview, which included Ben Tanzer's story "What We Thought We Knew" in issue 20.

~

Sunday, September 6, 2009

Best American Short Stories 1997



the new issue of blueprintreview is now in the selection stage. parallel to that, i am reading the collection "The Best American Short Stories 1997" - as first selected by Kartina Kenison, and finally picked by E. Annie Proulx, who noted in the introduction:

"The process of choosing stories for this collection was simple enough: one reads, sorts, reads again, considers, sorts, scribbles, tears out hair, reads again."

which basically sums up the blueprintreview selection process, too: read, read again, sort, re-sort, read, surrender, return, read..

interesting sidenote: Proulx then adds that it was suggested to her to read the stories 'blind' (with the author's name effaced), and comes to the conclusion:
"It did not work for me. It seemed absurd that any reader charged with this task of selection would choose stories because of an author's name or reputation."

thing is, the reason i picked this story collection was exactly because of an author's name: E. Annie Proulx name on the cover. after reading her novel "Shipping News" in spring, i felt her choice of stories would be worthwile, too.

plus, i liked the way Proulx arranged the stories in a broader context, by sorting them into four categories, 'as a reminder of the rich possibilities of the story form':

Manners and Right Behaviour
Identifying the Stranger
Perceived Social Values
Rites of Passage

~

Friday, August 21, 2009

Cha, Zoo, Dance



the new issue of Cha is up - here the link: Cha August 2009. i instantly fell for the title artwork, and for the Swift quote and the combined reflections on it in the editorial.

I remember some other life as if it's mine.
My country has become a stamp, weather,
And what my mother says, over the phone.


~

also up and open now: J. A. Tyler's "The Zoo - A Going". which is: a whole novella, posted one piece a time. right now, there is the fox:

He says the fox is on stilts, my dad, when it passes by the place we are looking. We are up on a step, mom dad son, and we are watching past the edge of bushes, watching the fox on stilts walking circles around this thing, this rectangle.

to come next: the panther, the jaguar, the cheetah.

~

and a link from last week - i took a New Yorker short story with me for the flight: Sherman Alexie's "War Dances". the first line of it drew me in:

A few years ago, after I returned home to Seattle from a trip to Los Angeles, I unpacked my bag and found a dead cockroach, shrouded by a dirty sock, in a corner. Shit, I thought. We’re being invaded.

looks like a collection of short stories at first, but don't get tricked. it's one humorous & existential story.

~

Friday, August 7, 2009

unfilmable color herons



some noteworthy links of this week:

WIRED tries to figure out which unfilmable books and comic will be turned into films next. the picturesque article and a vote, here: "After Watchmen, what's 'Unfilmable'?"

YATZER comes with text-portraits, landscape-art and with a curious question: "What is your Favorite Color and Why?"- scroll down to the bottom of the page for the colorful answers.

FOLDED WORD turned Mel Bosworth's short story "Leave Me As I Lessen" into a Heron mini-mag .. and left it in public places. the story in audio - including heron stops - in a youtube-clip, here: Launching Heron.

~~