I can recommend Matthew Cheney’s piece Stories in the Key of Strange: A Collage of Encounters, at Weird Fiction Review. More and more, Cheney says, he finds himself
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attracted to innovative writing that isn’t afraid to leave great gaps within itself, that doesn’t try to stick the world onto a postage stamp, but rather puts a postage stamp in the middle of the world’s unfathomable complexities.
Though he’s careful not to glue them in place, he lays into his collage elements from Leen Krohn, Kelly Link, Barry Lopez, China Mieville, Jan Morris & Christopher Priest; & at one point comes to the perhaps fleeting, certainly controversial but very refreshing conclusion that “all fiction, regardless of its label or merit, possesses an allegorical connection to reality”.
It’s nice to be encouraged to be grown up again, to keep open, as Cheney puts it, “every imaginative and imagined option”. I’m on the edge of my seat to see what happens next at WFR.
Cheney, not Cheyney …
Oops. Thanx Henry. Fixed.
Good stuff! Many thanks for recommending W.F.R a while back, even went out and bought the book. It’s a weighty tome printed on good quality white paper, the sort which won’t yellow with age. Introduced me to many new authors, the web-site is good too, makes a 3G phone worth having, always something to read on it when stuck in a waiting room some where!