Category: flash fictioin

Friday Five: literary Easter eggs

Some literary morsels to entertain, inform, and possibly inspire.

On this Good Friday, as we enter Easter weekend, here are five literary morsels — little Easter eggs I recently hunted down to pass along for your reading and listening pleasure. May they provide some amusement, entertainment, and even inspiration.

  • 13 Ways of Looking at Socks is one poet’s “meditations on something so deeply mundane that we rarely think about it until we reach into the sock drawer and it’s empty or just sad and disappointing and now you have to do laundry.” The author, Mary Roblyn, wrote it as a riff on Wallace Stevens’ 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. In Roblyn’s case, she accompanies her writing with relevant photos.
  • “Good writers borrow, great writers steal.” We’ve all heard that old saying, right? Writer B.J. Novak (he of “The Office” fame) takes it literally in this short audio piece, which he and actor Aasif Mandvi read to open a recent episode of the podcast Selected Shorts (highly recommended for fans of short fiction). The story is from Novak’s book of short stories, One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories.
  • Vermilion Cliffs is a lovely piece of micro fiction by Allison Field Bell, published in Fractured Lit, the online literary journal devoted to flash and micro fiction.
  • “Far from this foreign Easter damp and chilly/My soul steals to a pear-shaped plot of ground,/Where gleamed the lilac-tinted Easter lily/Soft-scented in the air for yards around;” — begins Claude McKay’s poem/meditation “The Easter Flower.”
  • Here’s the pitch, baseball fans: Some of the greatest books about sports are also about so much more. Just in time for the opening of baseball season, Keith O’Brien, the author of a book about one of the game’s greatest tragic figures, Pete Rose, gives us Greek Tragedy in the Bottom of the Ninth: On Baseball’s High Literary Drama. Play ball!

Photo by Laurentiu Iordache on Unsplash

Baseball 1971 (flash fiction from the archives)

A bit of baseball-themed fiction as we warm up for spring training

Now that the Super Bowl hoopla is behind us (congrats to the Kansas City Chiefs, victors of Super Bowl LXIII), we can focus our attention on more important matters, like baseball.

Baseball and American literature have a long and storied history, and I’m proud to have contributed ever so slightly to the rich catalog of baseball-inspired literature with a short (500-word) story I wrote nearly 30 years ago that was published in a literary magazine called Fan: A Baseball Magazine. The little magazine was a labor of love for baseball aficionado Mike Schacht, an artist who specialized in depicting the heroes of the game he loved and who died in 2001.

I’d love to get this story republished in a more current baseball-themed literary magazine like The Twin Bill, but its editors are only interested in previously unpublished work. And there aren’t many other niche baseball litmags out there. So instead, I’m sharing it here. I hope you enjoy.

Baseball 1971

by Andrew Careaga

Originally published in Fan: A Baseball Magazine, No. 28 (Spring 1998)

He was years away from his three-thousandth hit and the time when the fans of Boston would again cheer him. But today Yaz looked as old and weary as my father. Today the boos rained down on him, weary old Atlas, as he adjusted his batter’s helmet, digging his cleats into the batter’s box, holding his bat aloft, the way only Yaz could do it, high and straight and outstretched, waving it in tight circles with his powerful wrists, like a club to fend off the jeers from above.

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