Posts by David Backer

David Backer edits www.fictiondaily.org .



A Manual for Readers

“Rejoice.” –Donald Barthelme, from The Dead Father INDEX first-person second-person third-person long-thin twitter-sized square with many paragraph breaks with rhetorical questions long by a famous person by an unknown person *

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Benjamin Kunkel, Benedict Anderson, and the Fate of the Novel

The first sections of Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson read like an unknowing echo to Benjamin Kunkel’s recent piece in n+1, “Goodbye to the Graphosphere,” regarding the fate of the novel. In that essay, appearing in a forthcoming collection about the future of books from Soft Skull Press, Kunkel recounts the publishing industry’s past and juxtaposes

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InDigest 1207 NYC

InDigest continued its reading series “1207″ the other night at the KGB Bar.  Dustin Nelson founded the quarterly online mag two years ago and has crafted a solid website that plays host to a variety of voices in the arts. InDigest’s analog manifestation is the reading series, which encourages presenters to read something from their own

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Anderbo @ KGB = Lovely

Anderbo had a lovely reading two nights ago at the KGB Bar. This is an excellent journal that boasts a million hits a year thanks to the prodigious efforts of its editor Rick Rofihe, who sat in the center of the bar like a conductor orchestrating the presentation of eight highly enjoyable pieces. Some highlights:

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Realism

On April 25, Joshua Cohen interviewed Joseph McElroy for a Triple Canopy podcast. The theme of the podcast was realism. About ten minutes into the interview, dance-responding to a question about “the disturbing puzzle of the real,” McElroy mentions a reaction he once had to Melville’s main character in “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” McElroy says, “What

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A Reflection on March’s Online Fiction

March was a march of whimsy.1 It started when Amy Hempel shook Fictionaut‘s tectonic plates when she posted “In The Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried.” This story got the most hits of any other story in that electronic community: 930 and growing, with 35 comments.2 The content of the comments are telling. In awe and

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Highlights from February’s Online Fiction

After reading a lot of online fiction last month, I’m noticing something: people like people. People like reading about people, anyway.But this isn’t carefully said. “People” is too general a term for what I mean. Having studied some philosophy, I know that when we talk this way we use the universal quantifier. But if we’re

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