My novel Flicker in the Porthole Glass was published by MAMMOTH Books in 2002. The Review of Contemporary Fiction observed that, "...the achievement here is Desautels’s prose, an aural event both jagged and elegant, assaultive and inviting, that moves with the clipped, dangerous, urgent kinesis of hard bop jazz." Seven years down the road, I'm…
The extended summer we've been enjoying in southwest PeeYay finally seems to have burned itself out. Just two weeks ago the sun shone and we basked in lovely, sweaty, ninety-degree afternoons. But the shortening evenings laid bare our delusions of endless summer, and yesterday I froze my ass for five hours trying to play tournament…
Some fine young people have embarked on the thankless endeavor of publishing a new online literary magazine, Eighty Percent. I'm pleased my piece, "Jacques Rigaut on the Eve of Departure," appears in this premier issue. All the best to Dani, Meg and Shaun, editors of Eighty Percent. Show them a little love and support--visit the…
In Swann's Way, the opening work of Marcel Proust's opus In Search of Lost Time, you will find the following oft-remarked-upon passage [2003 Viking edition, translation by Lydia Davis]: I would stop by the table, where the kitchen maid had just shelled them, to see the peas lined up and tallied like green marbles in…
I suppose I could have also called this short post "Love Your First Draft's Moles and Warts." However you look at it, you have to fall in love with your first draft, even if it's a clunky, undistinguished, vague, pedestrian, mistake-ridden mess. You have to fall in love with the mess that is your first…
Ed Desautels' Maximum Fiction 