The following is a short short story I wrote years ago as a kind of crazy, Americanized homage to the style of the great Austrian novelist, Thomas Bernhard. It was inspired by the transvestites who used to hang out at the Savoy Restaurant in Philadelphia during my time there in the mid 80s. It was…
Seeds of Housebreaking the Muse
Jacques Rigaut's Happiest Birthday: A Dada Bedtime Story In my August 12 post, I talked about how I stumbled across the figure of the French dadaist, gigolo, addict, and suicide, Jacques Rigaut and presented an excerpt from his appearance in my novel (in progress) Housebreaking the Muse. Some years ago, having "discovered" Rigaut, I worked…
Craft Notes: Waste Not, Want Not
Years ago I took my first writing course, an undergraduate intro fiction offering taught by a high-strung, tenured loon whose own aspirations as a playwright had burned out along with his ability to comport himself civilly in social situations. His over-the-top insistence on a kind of Victorian propriety, combined with his inability to suppress his…
Gene Krupa’s Never-Before-Published Science Fiction Story (a short story)
This short story won a 1994 Associated Writing Programs Intro Fiction Award and was first published in the Fall 1994 edition of Hayden's Ferry Review. It presages my novel Flicker in the Porthole Glass as an attempt to mythologize my experiences living in Philadelphia in the mid-1980s. It also attempts to comment on the nature…
l’Ennui de la Lune
(This short story originally appeared in volume 23, numbers 1 and 2, of Pennsylvania English.) Download the entire story. [PDF]
Ed Desautels' Maximum Fiction 