Tag: Fiction
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The Artificial Joy of Men in Tights
“You get a big delight in every bite!”
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Where Fact Meets Fiction
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by
My personal journeys work best as parody. I am a very unserious traveler. I board the train for the potato cutlet, not the arrival in Bangaluru.
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Book Review: Pictures of Houses with Water Damage
The 21 stories show in kaleidoscopic form the life, as lives, of an individual confronting the fallout of unrepentant infidelity, unwanted pregnancy, alcohol dependence, failed marriage; We watch lives wrecked by emotional pain, rendered faithfully through the eyes of a cuckold, a cheatwife, a wounded vet boyfriend, a lonely lurking neighbor…
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Ben’s Franklins
Micro-fiction channeling moments of truth. Walking the forests of the Shenandoah National Park last week, I thought about how I’d pass the days and weeks and months as a thru-hiker on the Appalachian Trail. One exercise I settled on for keeping sane step after step was to craft a 100-word story each day out there.…
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COVID, or Covfefe?
Covfefe is the sound of an old man choking on his attempt to say “COVID” While forced isolation has us looking for ways to pass the time at home, I look for something meaningful to read and settle on Poe. The meandering path of my literary pursuit began this morning with Book Fight!, a Podcast…
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Cube Farm
BOGIE, or Why I Wrote Patchworks My second novel addresses gun violence in America. It didn’t start out that way. Patchworks‘ protagonist, a millennial grad student interning for peanuts within a government bureaucracy, didn’t appear until several months into writing. And, angry as I felt to see America shredded over and over again by episodes of massive…
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Mail Call—Trump-Sized Satire
Oh happy day! New books arrived for review, including one unexpected. Thanks to a tip from writing coach, author, and blogger Marylee MacDonald and literary website Dactyl Review I find myself in possession of not one but TWO books courtesy of author U.R. Bowie. The first looks like a novel of the most ridiculous order for…
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For All You Novelists
Creative writing is a walk along a fine line. That line divides the seen and the unseen, the knowable and the unknown, the past and the future, cause and effect. Sanity and madness. Creative writers tread by feel to bridge the one and the other. For some the means is poetry. For others, memoir, essay,…
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Speaking of Oscar
Previously blogged: Oscar KeyE is Dead. Long Live Oscar Keye. Rather than dwell on my dislike for all things Oscar Awards, trying to unravel the reasons for my disdain, I’ll revisit one thing I do love about Oscar: his utility as an early alter-ego. ‘Oscar Keye is dead and I am free,’ I wrote in…
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Revising for Backstory
Emotion How does a writer revise an old manuscript? Skim the surface line-editing a well-worn draft? I suppose there’s a method for every problem. What if the problem is an absence of feeling and emotion? In this case the problem demanded the author talk himself to the solution. I sat down and wrote to myself:…
Ben East Books 