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…
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…
Repost Update: Hard to believe I wrote this piece of (I guess you could call it) flash fiction in 2009. Considering we've managed to blast forward another five years, I thought I'd mark the 45 years since that odd pow wow in upstate New York and give the post another ride at the top of…
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…
(This short story originally appeared in volume 23, numbers 1 and 2, of Pennsylvania English.) Download the entire story. [PDF]
