for thinking people
March 25, 2019
The text that follows, “More than a Sum”, is a short story I wrote after a particularly vivid dream. Many great stories begin this way, so my advice to fellow authors is to note down such dreams as soon as they wake up.
The story might remind you – at least in terms of style – of another short story published here. I think “More than a Sum” is less Kafkaesque than that one, but I do detect some similar topical traces.
January 3, 2019
Imagine a world where people snub literature and knowledge. Those who read are “readers”, a derogatory term barely superior to being a burger-flipper. It’s a world just like our own. When you think of it, it is our own. Welcome to Illiterary Fiction, my latest literary-fiction novel.
As with most of interesting ideas, this too began with a what-if question. Seeing the impossible mediocrity that surrounds us, the disappearance of basic reading and writing skills, I had a what-if moment.
What if people stopped reading altogether? What if there existed professional readers, whose job would be to read and summarize for those who wouldn’t read anything longer than a tweet?
November 27, 2018
It almost sounds like the name of a newspaper, doesn’t it? Hypocrisy Today. I don’t know if patterns of human behavior are timeless or not, maybe they are. Or, perhaps, it is only their drives that are unchangeable.
In other words, maybe love, hate, and the desire for power are eternal, whereas courtship, warfare, and hypocrisy depend on a given culture and society. Hypocrisy today might not be the same as it once was.
If something has changed in the way hypocrisy today propagates, that is certainly the levels of audacity it can reach. To put it simply, there used to be a fig leaf covering hypocritical actions. Politicians didn’t dare to lie blatantly. This has changed, drastically.
As any self-respecting author, fiction is for me a way to express the inexpressible, to channel a savage need to understand reality. And so, I’ve been lately working on a novel that is partly about hypocrisy in today’s world.
Instead of writing an article about it, here’s an excerpt from this upcoming novelI am referring to Illiterary Fiction. I have slightly modified it for online use.
