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Tag: fiction

“The Lottery,” by Shirley Jackson – The New Yorker

The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green. The people of the village began to gather in the square, between the post office and the bank, around ten o’clock; in some towns there were so many people that the lottery took two days and had to be started on June 26th, but in this village, where there were only about three hundred people, the whole lottery took only about two hours, so it could begin at ten o’clock in the morning and still be through in time to allow the villagers to get home for noon dinner.

fiction, writing

21/03/2025
The ideal candidate will be punched in the stomach – Scott Smitelli

Whatever this job has given you—and to be crystal clear it has given you most of the down payment on a house—it is not enough to offset this sense of constant dread. Whatever you have given to this job, certainly things that cannot ever be quantified on a bank statement, there are now pieces of yourself that are missing. Pieces you didn’t even realize were being given away. Pieces that, in this moment, you worry you might never get back.

fiction, jobs, work, writing

18/03/2025
An exhibition of non-existent books – Hyperallergic

Created by a team of artists, printers, bookbinders, and calligraphers, these books don’t belong to the real world, at least not in the traditional sense. They can be “lost” or “unfinished,” both of which apply to Sylvia Plath’s Double Exposure (1964/2024?), a semi-autobiographical novel about a wife with an awful husband, the manuscript of which was possibly destroyed by her awful real-life husband, Ted Hughes. The existence of this book here, with its cover of a doubled Plath beneath a serifed title and published by the actual Heinemann company, suggests an alternate and more kind reality in which Plath did not die by suicide, and her manuscript had not vanished. Or they are books that never existed at all, except in the worlds conjured in other works of fiction, such as “The Garden of Forking Paths,” mentioned in a Jorge Luis Borges collection fittingly entitled Fictions (1944).

art, books, fiction, Jorge Luis Borges, poetry, Sylvia Plath, writing

10/02/2025
3D Workers Island

3dwi.scr is a freeware screensaver. The full title is “3D Workers Island”, but most of us prefer to use its filename instead, pronounced “3D whisker.” In 3D Workers Island, six characters interact on a tiny island, with complex and unpredictable results. Every session tells a different story of the island.

art, fiction, writing

07/11/2024