Laurie Stone

Everything is Personal, Notes on Now is a collage of hybrid narratives that begin with the stunning events of November 2016 and challenge Stone, a longtime feminist and writer for the Village Voice, to feel good when everything is bad. Freely jumping between social commentary, criticism, memoir, and fiction, Stone reports on traveling to D.C. to bird-dog senators ahead of the hearings for Brett Kavanaugh, considers the pleasures and terrors of the #MeToo movement, reassesses the legacy of Valerie Solanas, and recalls the way that in 1968 the sense of power and hope made you feel it would always be 1968. The pieces are constructed the way dreams and films are: juxtaposing images, racing along with dolly shots, moving in for close-ups, and pulling back for a sweeping sense of time. Woven throughout are chunks from Stone's Facebook posts that read like tender and funny postcards written to everyone from a time that is unimaginable, even as it's being lived.

Everything is Personal: Notes on Now

A woman meets a man and falls in love. She is sixty, a writer and lifelong New Yorker raised by garmentos. She thought this kind of thing wouldn’t happen again. He is English, so who knows what he thinks. He is fifty-six, a professor now living in Arizona, the son of a bespoke tailor. As the first of Laurie Stone’s linked stories begins, the writer contemplates what life would be like in the desert with the professor. As we learn how she became the person she is, we also come to know the artists and politics of the downtown scene of the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, a cultural milieu that remains alive in her. In sharply etched prose, Stone presents a woman constantly seduced by strangers, language, the streets— even a wildlife trail. Her characters realize that they feel at home in dislocation—in always living in two places at the same time: east and west, past and present, the bed and the grave (or copper urn). Love may not last, the writer knows. Then again, when has anything you thought about the future turned out right?

Stories

My Life as an Animal

Meg Pokrass

Matthew Mahaney

Barr Bielinski

Justin Lawrence Daughtery

NANO Fiction (print ISSN 1935-844X; digital ISSN 2160-939X) is non-profit literary journal that publishes flash fiction—a form of short story also known as micro fiction, micro narrative, micro-story, microrrelatos, postcard fiction, the short short, the short short story, kürzestgeschichten, and sudden fiction—of 300 words or fewer. Featuring twenty to thirty authors in each issue, NANO Fiction has roots that draw from Aesop’s Fables and Zen Koans. Notable practitioners of this prose form include Lydia Davis, Franz Kafka, Italo Calvino, Ignacio Martínez de Pisón, Naguib Mahfouz, and Linor Goralik, among others. This issue of NANO Fiction features works by: Allie Marini Batts, Barr Bielinski, Becky Bosshart, Cian Cruise, Chella Courington, Justin Lawrence Daugherty, Stephanie Dickinson, Barbara Westwood Diehl, Alisa Golden, Katy Gunn, Casey Hannan, Katie Jean Shinkle, Chase Holland, D. Seth Horton, Lisa Marie Hunter, Paul Kavanagh, Jacqueline Kharouf, Edan Lepucki, Matthew Mahaney, Laura McCullough, Wendy Merry, Vilaska Nguyen, Meg Pokrass, Jessica Probus, Laurence Ross, Forrest Roth, Woody Skinner, J. David Stevens, Laurie Stone, Vanessa Angelica Villarreal, Andrew Wickenden, Russ Woods, and Jacob Wren.

NANO Fiction Volume 6 Number 2

Leaving behind their Jewish heritage and Manhattan's Lower East Side for the swank suburbs of Long Island, plump, awkward Julie Stark and her family--unable to cope with their new life--seek the help of Serge, a sophisticated, reputedly brilliant Freudian

Starting with Serge

Uses interviews and essays to depict the standup comedy circuit; criticizes performers, their material, and their impact on audiences; and looks at the work of Bill Cosby, Joan Rivers, Paul Reubens, Jim Carrey, Jay Leno, and Bill Maher

A Decade of Subversive Comedy

Laughing in the Dark

Close to the Bone scouts the territories of sex, the family, loneliness, the city, addiction, and AIDS, but these are not passive tales of victimization. Rather, these writers speak in voices that are unflinching, unerring, and filled with revelation.

Laurie Stone

Books

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