Category: Fiction

Waiting For Anton, A Play in Five Acts

(The TLDR Edition of Five Plays by Anton Chekhov—all quotes verbatim, in the original order presented)

Act I: Ivanov

The house. Evening is coming on.

A: One needs money. Even suppose I find it, she still categorically….

C: That’s bad…I long ago saw in her face that she wouldn’t….
A: All nonsense, nonsense and more nonsense.
C: [Yawns.]
A: Nonsense and—
C: And a swindle.


White Mythology: A Novel by W.D. Clarke

Out today from corona\samizdat and available from their website

Synopsis: Dr. Ed’s head is spinning: a long-lost ‘son’ has just been sent over to his office by the temp agency, his shopping-addicted wife seems to have disappeared, and the clinical trial that he is running for a revolutionary new anti-depressant might well be going off the rails. But we needn’t worry about Dr. Ed: he is in control of everything, including himself.

Thus begins Skinner Boxed, the first of two thematically linked novellas that comprise White Mythology. In the second piece, Love’s Alchemy, five narrators deliver stories of betrayal that are nested like Russian dolls, stories that link an attempted seduction in Tokyo in 1987 to a brotherly schism that erupts during a bottle rocket game of ‘war’ in 1970s Massachusetts. From boys who poison their teacher’s plants to men who compulsively urinate into rivers, these strange (and strangely connected) monologues drop the reader into the pitch-black dunk tank of the soul.”

Add it to your “To Read” shelf on Goodreads.com:


“What Comes Up Primal Through The Cracks” — fiction by Rick Harsch

What follows is an excerpt from Rick Harsch’s second novel Billy Verité (1998, Steerforth Press), reprinted here with kind permission of the author. It comprises the entirety of Chapter 3, “Skunk in Kentucky.” Billy Verité can be read in the recently published omnibus edition of Harsch’s first three novels, The Driftless Trilogy, available online from coronasamizdat.com.


Another Lost Bergman Film

Ingmar Bergman Wild Stawberries

…In which the successful, independent heroine returns, book-worm young daughter in tow and for the first time in a decade or so after living for years in the city, to the provincial village of her youth, on account of a minor automobile accident on the highway not far from town.

Involuntarily towed to the nearest local garage, she is forced to wait for several days for parts to be delivered from Stockholm, and while she is hardly shocked at first to re-encounter the smallness and the pettiness of village life, she still finds that she has to gird herself to encounter the ghosts that she had once thought she had succeeded in leaving behind: the ascetic Calvinist pastor who had abused her, the first love she’d couldn’t bear saying goodbye to, the mother who hadn’t spoken to her ever since—and who had assumed that the all-too-public shaming that the heroine had brought down upon the good bourgeois family name (they’d been forced to abandon their nearly front-row pew in the local church over the scandal that the girl had caused!) was due to the looseness of her morals and not to the hypocrisy of the pastor who had raped and then banished her from the congregation.

Will the mother stoop to the mending of fences when confronted by the truth? Will the never-wed first love look past the sins that he still imagines are his beloved’s and not the irreproachable pastor’s, and find it in his heart to embrace both the heroine……


Ask The Pessimist

[Misinspired by George Saunders’ “Ask the Optimist!“, which has also been turned into a puppet show [!!] that you can read about here and view here.]

Dear Dr. Pessimist,
Don’t you find pessimism “negative”?!
–Just Sayin! in Cincinnati

Dear Just,
Just think of me as helping you obey the first and second laws of thermodynamics. In the real world, not only is energy always conserved (as it can never be created or destroyed), but also: all natural systems (and hey check it out! you are one, too!) tend to go south as it were, towards maximum entropy, towards irreversible disorganization. Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold (you know the rest).

So as I see it, my job is to cancel you and your optimism out, so that nothing of you or of what you say remains, just a perfect, eternal nullity. No loss, no gain, nothing, nothing contained in nothing—just nothing, nothing at all.

Zilch, nada, nichts. Rien, niente, nanimo. Nothing.
–Just sayin!

*     *     *

Dear Dr. Pessimist,
Whenever I’m not distracted (which is not very often if I can possibly help it, and I always find Tumblr and its ilk quite useful in that regard) I sometimes catch my self almost admitting to myself (if not to others, since that would be social, not to mention career, suicide) that, yikes! I might, perhaps, be a pessimist too(?) But really: UGH! That’s a downer, verging on an outright bummer. Which is depressing, in-and-of-itself, if you……


8-Track (a short story)

Their cleaning lady rarely needed to do much to the Living Room. The Tibbs were certainly not slobs like the Mullaneys across the street, with their five half-clothed kids always mucking about and a different beater in the driveway every month. Yet neither were they as deathly fastidious as the Dobbins next door (never a light on in the place and mausoleum dustcovers atop anything that didn’t threaten to move or to breathe). No, the Tibbs family definitely kept to the Middle Way; theirs was a relaxed, inviting house, but one in which everything had—and knew—its place. The kitchen was clean and tidy, the boys’ bedrooms less so. The roles allocated to the Den, the main-floor Family Room and the basement Rec Room were self-evident, easily understood by (and accommodating to) their numerous visitors. Most dinner or overnight guests would agree, if compelled to respond to an exit poll on the subject, that the furnishings were, in the main, both comfortable and practical, neither pretentious nor vulgar, and symbolic, perhaps, of a shared—if largely unspoken—intimacy.

Such, at any rate, is what young Gerald Tibbs, 23, would later remember hearing himself telling himself. And: that though he had never felt comfortable in the Living Room, it was not something to which he had ever given much thought. Still, he warily, unconsciously kept his distance. No one else save Fluffy (the family cat, a white car-accident-Manx) ever seemed to bother or to dare to go in there. There was a badly out of……