Fiction – Page 42 – Michigan Quarterly Review

Fiction

MQR 54:4 | Fall 2015

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A special section pays tribute to the work of Charles Baxter: Laurence Goldstein tells of discovering Baxter’s first submission to MQR, Matt Burgess discusses “Forbearance,” Michael Byers lays out a Baxterian taxonomy, Matthew Pitt discovers Baxter’s affinity with Wile E. Coyote, Joan Silber analyzes his use of melodrama, Valerie Laken explores “Minnesota nice,” and Jeremiah Chamberlin interviews the man himself.

Fiction from Beth Thompson, Garret Keizer, Ronna Wineberg, Maria Adelmann, Laura Lampton Scott, Jane Ratcliffe.

Poetry from Timothy Liu, Alessandra Lynch, Raymond McDaniel, Deborah Pope, Durs Grünbein.

MQR 54:4 | Fall 2015 Read More »

A special section pays tribute to the work of Charles Baxter: Laurence Goldstein tells of discovering Baxter’s first submission to MQR, Matt Burgess discusses “Forbearance,” Michael Byers lays out a Baxterian taxonomy, Matthew Pitt discovers Baxter’s affinity with Wile E. Coyote, Joan Silber analyzes his use of melodrama, Valerie Laken explores “Minnesota nice,” and Jeremiah Chamberlin interviews the man himself.

Fiction from Beth Thompson, Garret Keizer, Ronna Wineberg, Maria Adelmann, Laura Lampton Scott, Jane Ratcliffe.

Poetry from Timothy Liu, Alessandra Lynch, Raymond McDaniel, Deborah Pope, Durs Grünbein.

Not Essay, Nor Fiction, But Prose: Of Narration

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In his manifesto Reality Hunger, David Shields uses assemblage to curate a dialogue about the limits of The Real. The voices he appropriates and sequences implicitly argue that our increasingly urgent twenty-first century desire for reality is compromised by the fact that our storytelling mechanisms are growing further from it. As Shields notes (without acknowledging in the text proper that he is parroting E. L. Doctorow), “There’s no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there’s only narrative.”

Not Essay, Nor Fiction, But Prose: Of Narration Read More »

In his manifesto Reality Hunger, David Shields uses assemblage to curate a dialogue about the limits of The Real. The voices he appropriates and sequences implicitly argue that our increasingly urgent twenty-first century desire for reality is compromised by the fact that our storytelling mechanisms are growing further from it. As Shields notes (without acknowledging in the text proper that he is parroting E. L. Doctorow), “There’s no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there’s only narrative.”

“American Ships,” by Brenda Peynado

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When the American ships arrived, they looked like giant white women swimming towards us on the horizon. American marines shouted orders from the crooks of the ships’ pale elbows, readied guns in the corner of vicious smiles. I was pushing Pablito’s stroller on el Malecón, and the people around me said, Look, what is that? But I knew. I had seen them before, decades ago in the first invasion.

“American Ships,” by Brenda Peynado Read More »

When the American ships arrived, they looked like giant white women swimming towards us on the horizon. American marines shouted orders from the crooks of the ships’ pale elbows, readied guns in the corner of vicious smiles. I was pushing Pablito’s stroller on el Malecón, and the people around me said, Look, what is that? But I knew. I had seen them before, decades ago in the first invasion.

The Novella Is Not The Novel’s Daughter: An Argument in Notes

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The novella is slender but gaping. It embraces pause and pattern and gesture. It declares, “I can say more with less” and then it does. It is not an unwieldy short story but cohesive, taut, succinct. It is the novel’s architectural foundation, the stripped and fleshless core that argues the frame of a story might be enough.

The Novella Is Not The Novel’s Daughter: An Argument in Notes Read More »

The novella is slender but gaping. It embraces pause and pattern and gesture. It declares, “I can say more with less” and then it does. It is not an unwieldy short story but cohesive, taut, succinct. It is the novel’s architectural foundation, the stripped and fleshless core that argues the frame of a story might be enough.

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