Robert Musil: "Attempts to Find Another Human Being"

Robert Musil: "Attempts to Find Another Human Being" This site is intended as an informal space to share international discourse on the Austrian novelist, essayist, dramatist, scientist, mathematician, and thinker, Robert Musil, on his works, and his growing reception, and...

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Little Brother

by Kesi Bem Foster

He could feel his brother watching him from the doorway as he played video games. He heard his brother's cast thump the linoleum floor as he made his way over to their room. Hunched over, sitting on the edge of...

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Editor's Statement

by Mark Mirsky

As the editor of Fiction, I have been frustrated by our inability to bring out more issues annually and devote a larger number of pages to all the fiction that is submitted to us or that we could publish...

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Fiction remembers Dorothea Straus

by Mark Mirsky

Last summer, one of the staunchest admirers of Fiction, Dorothea Straus, passed away. Several years before that, sensing how fragile she was in the wake of her distinguished husband, the publisher Roger Straus's death, I went out to their historic...

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Max Frisch at the City College of New York, 1981 (audio)

by Mark Mirsky

I hope in the future to write a number of pages about my friendship with Max Frisch and his wife Marianne (the latter remains the European Editor of Fiction). In previous issues of Fiction during the 1980's (Volumes 7.3, 8.1...

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Coral Fernández

by Silvina Ocampo

Fiction 6.2 (1980) HER NAME WAS Coral Fernández; she always wore her hair over her left ear, leaving the right one uncovered. She was so pretty that at first I thought she was foolish. We met at a country luncheon...

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Downward Drifting

by Patricia Schultheis

Fiction 54 (2008) WE CLEANED FOR our mothers. Off boats and kerchiefed, they stood at conveyor belts, boxing brassieres or culling cartridges, their hands growing cramped, their ankles swollen, until, shift over, they scarcely could climb onto buses and ride...

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Open Letter On Our Numbering Switch

by Fiction

Dear Friends of Fiction, As many of you have noticed, we have moved to a new numbering system for our print issue. While we understand and regret the confusion this has caused, please be certain that we did not take...

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Editor's Reading List

by Mark Mirsky

Second fifteen titles from the Editor's list: Babel, Isaac - Collected Short Stories Bachman, Ingeborg - The Thirtieth Year Baldwin, James - Go Tell It On the Mountain Barth, John - End of the Road Barth, John- Lost in the...

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From Autonauts of the Cosmoway

by Julio Cortázar

Fiction 20.1 (2006) The plan becomes concrete IN THE AUTUMN of 1978, the basic idea of the expedition had been established, with the following rules of the game: 1. Complete the journey from Paris to Marseilles without once leaving the...

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Editor's Reading List

by Mark Mirsky

The first 15 titles from Editor Mark Jay Mirsky's Reading List: Aciman, Andre - Out of Egypt (Riverhead Books) Astrov, Margot - The Winged Serpent (American. Indian Prose and Poetry) Achebe, Chinua - No Longer at Ease Achebe, Chinua -...

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Lecture at CCNY, November 1981

by Max Frisch

This will be tiring for you, I know, and sometimes perhaps a little funny, because of my English pronunciation. So we can recuperate now and then, I will use quite a lot of quotes and the quotes you will hear...

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On Handke's A Sorrow Beyond Dreams

by Mark Mirsky

In a complex (though damning) review of Peter Handke's "Crossing the Sierra Los Gredos," in the August 19, 2007 issue of the New York Times Sunday Book Review, one line caught my eye, and raised a vigorous "No, unfair!" The...

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