Remember when we talked about Junot Diaz on our first day of class? In addition to being a novelist and short story writer, he's the editor of a literary magazine, the Boston Review. Here's how he describes what he's looking for in a good short story. (I'd like you to consider how this could apply to your own writing)
“I’m looking for fiction
that resembles the Thirty-Mile Woman from Toni Morrison’s Beloved:
‘She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she
gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.’ Or as
Takashi Murakami puts it: ‘We want to see the newest things. That is
because we want to see the future, even if only momentarily. It is the moment
in which, even if we don’t completely understand what we have glimpsed,
we are nonetheless touched by it. This is what we have come to call art.’
I’m looking for fiction in which a heart struggles against itself,
in which the messy unmanageable complexity of the world is revealed. Sentences
that are so sharp they cut the eye."
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