Tag: fiction

May We Borrow Your Husband? and Other Comedies of the Sexual Life by Graham Greene

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This entry is part 15 of 56 in the series 2022 Reads

As with other posts in this series, these #booksread2022 posts go anywhere from a few weeks to a month after I’ve read them. I read this particular book last week, though!  May We Borrow Your Husband?  is a 1967 collection of short fictions—in some cases, they’re in fact extended vignettes, and Greene himself called them “entertainments”—by Graham Greene. The subtitle—”And Other Comedies of the Sexual Life”—isn’t printed on the cover of the Penguin edition I have, but it pretty much sums up the book. It reminds me a bit of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City except it’s much grittier …

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Thoughts About You Bright And Risen Angels by William T. Vollmann, Flaws, and Envelope-Pushing

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When my friend, fellow Poundian, and coworker Jason Silvis left South Korea–I think in 2005–he gave me a copy of William T. Vollmann’s You Bright and Risen Angels, I imagine probably because the SFnal elements and the sheer challenge of the book would appeal to me. He had given the book a good hard try, but–at least from the pencil markings he’d made–didn’t get very far into it. Having just finished reading the book, I can see why. It’s a flawed book, even for a first novel, and not easy reading by any stretch of the imagination… or, rather, I …

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Unchangeables, Notions, and Actualities

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A snippet: All around the world, but particularly in our great Republic, inventors and professors set about applying the universal intrinsic principle. Some worked with formless Unchangeables in their seance lounges,  others with religious Notions, and a rare few, such as our Mr. Edison, with bulldog Actualities. The way he looked at it, if your calculations showed you couldn’t do something, then you went ahead and did it without the calculations. Here was one for whom the forces of electricity had been waiting!   –from You Bright and Risen Angels, by William T. Vollmann A huge book, left behind by a …

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Stranger Than Fiction

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Over the years, I’ve heard many people point out that truth is often stranger than fiction, that one is limited in fiction to writing stories in ways that actual people were not limited, such that if one wrote a story about such-and-such a real historical figure, nobody would believe it. I am pretty dubious about this idea, to be honest. Over the years, I’ve wrestled with how to do it, and–not that I’ve published any of the projects–I have a few stories I’ve been pruning and tidying and cleaning up lately which I think demonstrate how to do this. The …

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