His Last and First Breath
A man’s miraculous survival in a flash flood sets off a confrontation with his PTSD from the Iraq war. It may just destroy his family.
The world’s biggest novel in stories
about life and the people who try to make it through – with some hope intact …
Featured stories
Warriors
A police officer works hard to prevent a young man from juvenile detention, but begins to doubt his own motives.
Portrait of a Killer
So you have finally ditched both drugs and your violent boyfriend. Is it time to get rid of your gun, too?
That Which Cannot Be Broken
When a woman on the run is witness to bikers assaulting a man, she has to make yet another choice about life or death.
Like Blood In A Darkroom
Four friends from high school meet for one last time in an isolated holiday house to party all night before they go their separate ways. But as the clock ticks toward new year, only one thing is truly clear about the future: That nothing is.
Boats Against The Current
A story about our closest friendships, and how they sometimes risk breaking up before they even get started.
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Shade of the Morning Sun is ...
electronic literature / hypertext fiction / a network novel
a novel in stories / a short story cycle / a collection of linked short stories
contemporary literary fiction
Meet the author
Christopher Marcus has been developing the Shade of the Morning Sun project since 2011.
Reflections about ...
Electronic literature
“In general, as I have taken to saying to colleagues suspicious of all the buzz about digital technologies, the stake for literary studies in the digital age is not first of all technological. It is to follow the living language of human thought, hope, love, desire—and hate too—wherever it goes and wherever it has the capacity to be literary, even if the form, style, or grammar of such literariness does not always conform to canonical standards.”
– professor Alan Liu, “From reading to social computing” in Literary Studies in the Digital Age – An Evolving Anthology
Short stories
“[Virginia Woolf] said of photography; ‘Isn’t it odd how much more one sees in a photograph than in real life?’ This gives us, I think, a clue to the enduring power and appeal of the short story – short stories are snapshots of the human condition and of human nature, and when they work well, and work on us, we are given the rare chance to see in them more ‘than in real life.’.”
– William Boyd, author of Any Human Heart and Brazzaville Beach
Novels in stories
“Life is a loose-flowing thing. There are no plot stories in life.”
– Sherwood Anderson