Kyle Minor is the author of In the Devil's Territory, a collection of short fiction. Recent stories and essays were published in The Southern Review, Gulf Coast, Arts & Letters, Surreal South, Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers, and Best American Mystery Stories 2008.
The Believer is running an excerpt from Deb Olin Unferth’s forthcoming Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War. An excerpt from the excerpt:
George and I had gotten nowhere with joining any revolution. It was August. We’d been fired from one job and hadn’t found another. We’d managed to throw up a wall between us, or at least some small obfuscating stones (a dot of diamond, two glints of red). And now we had to get out of El Salvador. Our visas were running out. We couldn’t wait around for people to figure out what they were going to do about the bridges that had been exploded on the road to the border—put them back up, explode somebody back, chart a little path through the river—no time for any of that, George said, because to be stuck in El Salvador with an expired visa was no joke. So we set out. The truck drove in loops, searching for bridges still standing. A few kilometers from the border, some guys with black-market gym shoes threw their duffel bags off the truck and jumped out, ran into the trees.
One of Stephen Dixon’s favorite strategies is telling the same story repeatedly, but changing a variable in the cause-and-effect chain with each telling — having fate deal a slightly different event, for example, or causing a key agent to make a different choice — and then exploring how time rings the changes differently in the lives of the characters. Sometimes we seem to be reading a study in worry — what will happen to me and the people I love if I don’t rightly account for all the possible permutations of even the smallest choices I make? — and sometimes we seem to be reading a study in the futility of trying to fight the forces of fate, since maybe there’s no accounting for the consequences of our choices as they play out along the cause-and-effect chain when so many things are so far beyond our control. Agency is everything and/or there is no agency.
The most focused of Dixon’s fictions that employ this strategy can be found in his novel Interstate (which was a National Book Award Finalist in 1995, and yet is now, sadly, out of print, and ripe for reprinting by an outfit like Dalkey Archive Press or New York Review Books — whichever wises up first.) Interstate tells the same story eight times. A guy is driving a car on the interstate, his two daughters with him, and some rough-looking guys in another car show a gun. In each of the tellings READ MORE >
Stephen Dixon, in a new interview with Sean P. Carroll at Bookslut, says:
Fantagraphics became involved because Melville House, the publisher of three of my novels, didn’t want to bring out the three collections in one book. They thought it would be too expensive and a losing proposition. I thought the collections would generate no interest if published one at a time. That publishing 62 stories, never in book form and all rewritten, except for the unfinished ones still in manuscript form, which I finished for the collection, would be interesting and unusual if not unique as a body of work.
This is not the first time the people at Fantagraphics have proved themselves to be heroes of literature. Their catalog includes Joe Sacco’s Palestine, the Hernandez Brothers’ Complete Love and Rockets Library, Daniel Clowes’s Ghost World, R. Crumb’s The Book of Mr. Natural, and Chris Ware’s ACME Novelty Library. New releases in 2011 include Usagi Yojimbo: The Special Edition, Dave Cooper’s Bent (with an introduction by Guillermo del Toro), and David B.’s The Littlest Pirate King. You can find out more about all this goodness at http://www.fantagraphics.com/.
"Tamar and Judah," Arent de Gelder, 1667
When I was seven years old, an elderly deacon at Belvedere Baptist Church in West Palm Beach, Florida, challenged me to read the entire Bible start to finish, as he himself had done seven times. Being a reader and a baptized, you know, Baptist, I took him up on the challenge. After a few thrilling days in the early chapters of Genesis, in which I experienced two stories about the creation of the world, a worldwide flood (which one family survived by building a boat and filling it with all the animals of the world), and the invention of competing languages and subsequent dispersal of the nations at the Tower of Babel, (and here I know I’m leaving out all kinds of high-stakes trouble, none of it comparing to the serial genocides commanded by God in the Book of Exodus, but I digress), I came across the headscratching thirty-eighth chapter, which introduced me for the first time to such topics as coitus interruptus, legally-mandated sort-of incest (brother-in-law-on-sister-in-law and father-in-law-on-daughter-in-law), prostitution, extortion-by-prostitute, and threats-of-burning-to-death-as-a-result-of-unwanted-pregnancy (the extortion prevents the burning, thank god.) Here, by permission of King James I of England, in his commissioning proclamation of 1604 at the Hampton Court Conference, I bring you Genesis 38, for your entertainment and possible edification:
1And it came to pass at that time, that Judah went down from his brethren, and turned in to a certain Adullamite, whose name was Hirah.
2And Judah saw there a daughter of a certain Canaanite, whose name was Shuah; and he took her READ MORE >
Strangest novel I’ve ever read? Obabakoak, composed in Euskara (Basque) 
by Bernardo Axtaga, who, the jacket copy tells us, had to translate his own book into Spanish so that it might find a broad European readership. (It worked.)
Before we reach even the prologue, the book tells us about The Game of the Goose (el juego de la oca), which is played:
on a circular board of sixty-three squares, the sixty-third being occupied by Mother Goose. The first person to reach square sixty-three wins. Geese can also appear on the other squares and if you land on one of these, you jump forward to the next goose and get another throw of the dice. If you land on less fortunate squares such as the maze, the prison or the square symbolising death (a skull or skeleton) you must either wait for another player to take your place, go back several squares or return to square one.
The Game of the Goose is an apt stand-in for the structure of Obabakoak, which READ MORE >
heat on the southside
I.
last night, police cordoned the four square
blocks surrounding my house in pursuit of a thug
who unloaded on the shell of a gangsta
in the funeral parlor filled with formaldehyde
and lead. black folks scattered, staining
complicated streets. i settle in for summer:
the maze to the front door, running teens
smelling of weed and tragedy from my stoop
reminding my sons they are not sources
of admiration, praying that might change. not yet
june heat rises like the murder rate, gleam
and pop already midnight’s bitter tune
II.
fifteen years ago, tyehimba jess
told me about a funeral home
with a drive through window.
you pull up, push a call button
through bulletproof glass a friendly
somber attendant takes your request.
[series note: This post is the fifth of five, in a week-long series examining first sentences or paragraphs. It’s not my intention to be prescriptive about what kinds of first sentences writers ought to be writing. Instead, I hope to simply take a look at five sets of first sentences for the purpose of thinking about how they introduce the reader to the story or novel to which they belong. I plan to post them without commentary, as one might post a photograph or painting, and open up the comment threads to your observations as readers. Some questions that interest me and might interest you include: 1. How is the first sentence (or paragraph — I’ll include some of those, too, since some first sentences require the next few sentences to even be available for this kind of analysis) interesting or not interesting on grounds of language? 2. Does the first sentence introduce any particular (or general feeling of) trouble or conflict or dissonance or tension into the story that makes the reader want to keep reading? 3. Does the first sentence do anything to immerse the reader in the donnee, the ground rules, the world of the story, those orienting questions such as who speaks, when and where are we in space and time, etc.? 4. Since the first sentence, in the wild, doesn’t exist in the contextless manner in which I’ve presented these, in what kinds of ways does examining them like this create false ideas about the uses and functions of first sentences? What kinds of things ought first sentences be doing? What kinds of things do first sentences not do often enough? (It seems likely to me that you will have competing ideas about first sentences. Please offer them here. Every idea or observation gets our good attention.) The sentence/paragraph sets we’ve been or will be observing: 1. first sentences from Mary Miller’s Big World; 2. first sentences from physically large novels; 3. the first sentences from every book written by Philip Roth; 4. first sentences from the Norton Anthology of Short Fiction; 5. first sentences from Best European Fiction 2010.]
“Albania is a country where no one ever dies.”
– from The Country Where No One Ever Dies, Ornela Vorpsi
“If I had urinated immediately after breakfast, the mob would never have burnt down the orphanage.”
– “The Orphan and the Mob,” Julian Gough
“A cousin of mine had an aquarium built on her terrace, a rather imposing tank where strange, exotic sea creatures amused themselves in the company of all sorts of local specimen, destined to be eaten.”
– from While Sleeping, Antonio Fian READ MORE >
Emily Kendal Frey is a poet I like. She lives in Portland, Oregon and teaches at Portland Community College. She is the author three chapbooks: Airport (Blue Hour 2009), Frances (Poor Claudia 2010), and The New Planet (Mindmade Books 2010). A full-length collection, The Grief Performance, was selected by Rae Armantrout for the 2010 Cleveland State University First Book Prize, and is forthcoming in the spring of 2011. A new series, Sorrow Arrow, appears in regular installments at Ink Node.
Here is a new poem, [A HISTORY OF KNIVES]:
When I met you we were the shape of salt shakers. I married my dad and threw him in the ocean. I dragged him along the bottom as he filled with salt. I opened my legs and a grasshopper was there. Your first home was a house on stilts with butter dishes READ MORE >
[series note: This post is the fourth of five, in a week-long series examining first sentences or paragraphs. It’s not my intention to be prescriptive about what kinds of first sentences writers ought to be writing. Instead, I hope to simply take a look at five sets of first sentences for the purpose of thinking about how they introduce the reader to the story or novel to which they belong. I plan to post them without commentary, as one might post a photograph or painting, and open up the comment threads to your observations as readers. Some questions that interest me and might interest you include: 1. How is the first sentence (or paragraph — I’ll include some of those, too, since some first sentences require the next few sentences to even be available for this kind of analysis) interesting or not interesting on grounds of language? 2. Does the first sentence introduce any particular (or general feeling of) trouble or conflict or dissonance or tension into the story that makes the reader want to keep reading? 3. Does the first sentence do anything to immerse the reader in the donnee, the ground rules, the world of the story, those orienting questions such as who speaks, when and where are we in space and time, etc.? 4. Since the first sentence, in the wild, doesn’t exist in the contextless manner in which I’ve presented these, in what kinds of ways does examining them like this create false ideas about the uses and functions of first sentences? What kinds of things ought first sentences be doing? What kinds of things do first sentences not do often enough? (It seems likely to me that you will have competing ideas about first sentences. Please offer them here. Every idea or observation gets our good attention.) The sentence/paragraph sets we’ve been or will be observing: 1. first sentences from Mary Miller’s Big World; 2. first sentences from physically large novels; 3. the first sentences from every book written by Philip Roth; 4. first sentences from the Norton Anthology of Short Fiction; 5. first sentences from Best European Fiction 2010.]
“The slaughter hasn’t started yet.”
– Lee K. Abbott, “One of Star Wars, One of Doom”
“That was the year Hunca Bubba changed his name.”
– Toni Cade Bambara, “Gorilla, My Love”
“What he first noticed about Detroit and therefore America was the smell.”
– Charles Baxter, “The Disappeared”
“Alberto Perera, librarian, granted no credibility to police profiles of dangerous persons.”
– Gina Berriault, “Who Is It Can Tell Me Who I Am?”
“A man stood upon a railroad bridge in Northern Alabama, looking down into swift waters twenty feet below.”
– Ambrose Bierce, “An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge”
“The visible work left by this novelist is easily and briefly enumerated.”
– Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” READ MORE >
