– everything is connected
– and their starting dates in the lives of our characters
What would you do if you had ruined the first meeting with someone who could have been your best friend? Carrie has to find out quickly after her first meeting with Lin – at an insane party where everyone has a secret.
Carrie, Lin, Lars and Alan all meet to celebrate New Year’s Eve in an isolated holiday house half a year after high school. But as the clock ticks towards the coming year, only one thing is truly clear about the future and old friendships …
While trying to save a young boy from drowning, Jon almost drowns in a flash flood himself. The boy dies and once again Jonathan has to face off with his survivor’s guilt from the Iraq war 15 years earlier. And his attempts to find peace may just end up destroying his family …
Carrie has finally ditched both drugs and her violent boyfriend. Is it time to get rid of her gun, too?
Jon works hard to prevent a young man from juvenile detention, but begins to doubt his own motives.
When Carrie is a witness to bikers assaulting a man, she has to make yet another choice about life or death.
an online literary project
an ever-growing collection of linked short stories
a century-long chronicle of three generations in the same family
Christopher Marcus
“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
“[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
“I no longer feel attracted to the well-made novel … I want to write the story that will zero in and give you intense, but not connected moments of experience. I guess that’s the way I see life. People remake themselves bit by bit and do things they don’t understand. The novel has to have a coherence which I don’t see anymore in the lives around me.”
– Alice Munro
Thanks to all the wonderful photographers who kindly made their photos available for creative commons use!
More linked short stories / short story cycles:
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