Brevity

Short introduction -- Vignettes. Readings: Colette: Tthe other wife"; Isaac Babel: "An incident on the Nevsky Prospekt"--Character sketches. Readings: L.E. Leone: "The argument for a shotgun"; Josefina Estrada: "The extravagant behavior of the naked woman"--Letters. Readings: Yasunari Kawabata: "Canaries"; Phil Karasik: "Mickey the dog phones home" -- Diary entries. Readings: Will Stanton: "Barney"; Mark Budman: "The diary of a salaryman" -- Lists. Readings: Sei Shonagon: "Annoying things"; Steve Martin: "Disgruntled former lexicographer" -- Fables. Readings: Anonymous: Untitled; Raphael Dagold: "The two rats and the BB gun" -- Anecdotes. Reading: The peasant and the genie -- Prose poems. Readings: Yusef Komunyakaa: "Nude interrogation"; Len Kuntz: "Story problems" -- Soliloquies, rants, riffs, and themes. Readings: Christine Byl: "Hey, Jess McCafferty"; John Edgar Wideman: "Witness" -- Perfect miniatures. Readings: John Collier: "The chaser"; Jeffrey Whitmore: "A bedtime story" -- Intermission: cutting down. Bruce Taylor: "Exercise" -- Surrealism. Readings: Richard Brautigan: "A need for gardens"; Donald Barthelme: "The baby" -- What if? Readings: Wayland Hilton-Young: "The choice"; Dicky Murphy: "The magician's umbrella" -- Genre. Readings: Roxane Gay: "The mistress of baby breath"; Tara Orchard: "My love" -- Setting. Readings: Bharati Mukherjee: "Courtly vision"; Alice Walker: "The flowers" -- Twists. Readings: Luisa Valenzuela: "Vision out of the corner of one eye"; Saki: "The open window" -- Viewpoints. Readings: Robert Schipits: "Dialogue between two teenagers, one interested in cars and one not"; Ryan Ridge: "Shaky hands & all" -- Mass compression. Readings: Bruce Holland Rogers: "Dinosaur"; Susan O'Neill: "Memento mori" -- Metafiction. Readings: Ptim Callan: "Story"; Jorge Luis Borges: "Borges and I" -- Vanishing point. Readings: Merilee Faber: "We came around the corner"; Dean Clayton Edwards: "It was pretending"; Davian Aw: "She raised the glass"; Augusto Monterroso: "The dinosaur" -- The future -- Conclusion