Tag Archives: fiction

Dust in the Wind

Posted on November 13, 2024 by John Biscello

A musician named Sam introduced me to Ask the Dust when I was in my early twenties. It was exactly the book I needed at the time. Sam had heard me read at the Vault, a house-based, performance space in … Continue reading →

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Scarecrow

Posted on November 13, 2024 by John Biscello

You got to ask yourself: Do you want to fuck Judy Garland? Or do you want to become her? I wasn’t prepared for this line of questioning. I was eleven at the time. Or twelve. I think, eleven. My mother’s … Continue reading →

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Out of Silence

Posted on November 10, 2024 by John Biscello

Beckett spoke about it: the inability to keep quiet. The inability to not say stories, to not make stories, to not find oneself shaped according to stories fitted to shifting forms. Beckett, with gallows irony, talked plenty about silences. He … Continue reading →

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Memory and Fiction

Posted on November 10, 2024 by John Biscello

What is the difference between memory and fiction? What are the intersecting policies of their tenuous and subjective relationship? For example: You have a woman, a mother recalling her dead daughter. She sees her daughter playing on the beach, she … Continue reading →

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Monkeys and Barrels

Posted on November 9, 2024 by John Biscello

None of it was going anywhere. It had been a while. Both things were true. Both could be beginnings. So let’s go with both: None of it was going anywhere. It had been a while. I felt like a dehydrated … Continue reading →

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Marguerite Duras

Posted on November 8, 2024 by John Biscello

Marguerite Duras crowed about nothing. And nothingness. Lyrics like so much silky water threaded in the raptures of an eddy. Whirling, heady, intoxicating, a dizzying effect that spoke sheerest volumes about the secret history of love. Love for M.D. was … Continue reading →

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No Dominion

Posted on November 8, 2024 by John Biscello

Dark. Lights up. Piles of sand on stage. Reddish sand. In some areas, the sand is piled high, forming mini-dunes. In other areas, thin flat layers. Sticking out of the sand are shards of glass. A woman lying on stage … Continue reading →

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Through a Screen Darkly

Posted on October 15, 2024 by John Biscello

(A review of Lisa 2, v1.0, by Nicholas Rombes) It begins in an irremediable present-tense, a limbo of cirrus and gray, in which the voice of a man, functioning out of narrative necessity, becomes spectral detective to the story of … Continue reading →

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Sea Change

Posted on August 25, 2024 by John Biscello

Excerpt from my recently completed novel, Worlds Last Imagined. This fragment is a meditation upon the tenuous and subjective relationship between memory and fiction: She stood at a distance, imagining her daughter there, playing. She saw how her daughter lit … Continue reading →

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Stand-Up

Posted on February 22, 2024 by John Biscello

This is not a not a novel. This is a rhapsody. I rhapsodize, I bubble, I ferment, I fount. The amassing of word-shaped sounds have become rhapsodies, digressions, solos within spheres and platforms of soul-sounding species and choruses, the every … Continue reading →

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