short fiction

In many of these stories, which range in length from several words to over 20 pages, Davis approaches her subject - be it a situation, an emotion, a state of bring - with almost scientific interest. Their titles reflect this: The Fish, The Mouse, Mothers, What an Old Woman Will Wear, Lost Things. These are meticulous dissections, intricate descriptions of, say, what it means to be right, or of betrayal, or the relationship of a mother and daughter. But somehow she evokes more, she pulls the reader into the stories - and they are stories - and her endings, whether it be after one paragraph or many pages, are breathtaking. 

(Source: Review in The Short Review by Tania Hershman)

Book of Waste is a collection of bleak short stories that can be read in multiple directions. The text is often imposed against atmospheric photography and unstable video effects with accompanying ambient sound. In some stories, the text is manipulated or moves/transforms over time, adding to the work's overall sense of instability. One section requires the discovery of a short number code to gain access to it.

A satirical piece of netart featuring multiple short fictions detailing the failure of well-known, contemporary institutions, primarily corporations such as Apple, IKEA, and CNN, though corporatized political entities (Canada, France, and the White House) and individuals (author Neil Gaiman) are also ribbed. Readers access the prose narratives by hovering over iconographic logos, affixed to a rotating, transparent globe. A minimalist, electronic soundtrack, reminiscent of those used in planetarium productions from the late 1970s and early 1980s, enhances the work's retro-futurist commentary on the factors leading to obsolescence in the capitalist world-system.

Frequently Asked Questions about "Hypertext" is a short fiction, in the form of a FAQ document, that revolves around various interpretations of a 69-word poem called "Hypertext." The poem "Hypertext," nominally by "Alan Richardson," is composed from all the hidden words/anagrams contained within the nine-letter word "hypertext." The tongue-in-cheek interpretations of the fictional poem include the perspectives of language poetry, cultural studies, feminism, and transgender studies. Emerging through the interpretations and FAQ answers, however, are the interwoven "real-life" stories of the troubled author and his/her troubled critics. The poem's notoriety creates a fan fiction phenomenon centered around an online database, which, along with its creator(s), comes under attack. As in Nabokov's Pale Fire, pseudo-literary criticism gives way to a mystery story about the real author of the text, transformation and transsexuality, love and murder.

(Source: Author description, ELC 1).

With Fibonacci's Daughter the challenge was to capture the Fibonacci precepts--elements of predictability in natural forms--in a narrative. His mathematical sequence of numbers and golden sector were sources for narrative shape, structural organization, and design motif. I wanted the story to have a sense of spiraling both in and out at the same time--disappearing at the center and diffusing at the margins. The structure is based on the Fibonacci golden mean; the spatial access is through a shopping mall that is a golden square. Backgrounds, images, and motifs are drawn from Fibonacci's work. The story has, as well, a shadow of Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story, "Rappacini's Daughter," in a certain altered perception of pattern. Borges lurks.

(Source: Author's note at The New River)