– 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 has finally ditched both drugs and her violent boyfriend. Is it time to get rid of her gun, too?
While trying to save a young boy from drowning, Jon almost drowns himself in a a flash flood. 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 …
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.
Carrie, Lin, Lars and Alan meet for one last time in an isolated holiday house to party all night before they go their separate ways after high school. But as the clock ticks toward new year, only one thing is truly clear about the future: That nothing is.
These are the most recent stories added to Shade of the Morning Sun, including flash fiction and vignettes.
(Dates on each post denote when in time the stories are set.)
Carrie has started taking Taekwondo-classes but is kicked to the floor again and again.
Emma is fighting despair about the state of the world. [Vignette]
On her first vacation overseas, Emma is struggling to keep her first relationship going.
Carrie has to decide if she wants to keep living with Lin.
On the way to her new psychiatrist, Lin decides to start treatment early. [Vignette]
While visiting his disabled sister, Lars has an unexpected revelation.
In New York, a lonely Deborah ponders what life may hold for her now. [Vignette]
contemporary electronic literature
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
“Life is a loose-flowing thing. There are no plot stories in life.”
– Sherwood Anderson
Thanks to all the wonderful photographers who kindly made their photos available for creative commons use!
© 2011-2022 All rights Reserved - Christopher Marcus.
