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 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…
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…
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]
Ed Desautels' Maximum Fiction 