Tag: short story

Recently published: ‘Hypnotist’ (short story)

A few months ago, I reviewed several old writings, short stories and essays I’d written in the late 1990s through early 2000s. I set aside several pieces I decided weren’t worthy of further work at this time, and focused on revising or rewriting a few that I thought might find a home in some literary journal. One of them is a 1,500-word short story called “Hypnotist.” I dusted it off, submitted it to five or six journals, and when a brand new student-run journal called Red String contacted me with a request to publish it, I happily and readily agreed. They published the story here a few weeks ago. I’m posting it below as well so that I have it in my archives and to correct the spelling of “Cobain,” which was misspelled in the published version.

Trigger warning: the story is rather dark. Proceed with caution.

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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