candle girl
15 Wednesday May 2024
Posted Books, Fairy tales, Fiction, Short story, Stories from underground, Universe, Writing
in15 Wednesday May 2024
Posted Books, Fairy tales, Fiction, Short story, Stories from underground, Universe, Writing
in14 Tuesday May 2024
Posted Books, Fairy tales, Fiction, Short story, Writing
in08 Wednesday May 2024
Posted Authors, Books, Dreams, Fairy tales, Fiction, flash fiction, Short story, Stories from underground, Writing
inTags
amazon, book, book launch, candle girl and other fantasies, creative writing, ebook, fantasy, hans christian andersen, kindle, short stories, short story collection, slipstream, speculative fiction
Dear Readers:
Recently, I self-published a collection of short stories entitled Candle Girl and Other Fantasies. A few of these stories have appeared in their earliest forms on this blog; the rest are brand new. There are eight tales in all, including light fantasies, dark fantasies, and a mix of the two. Thank you to all who may be interested in buying the book. I’d also like to mention here a few stories by others that have seeped into my imagination and have no doubt influenced my writing. I’ve read some of these stories more times than I can say and their magic has never failed to captivate and inspire me. Here are links to these stories:
Silent Snow, Secret Snow (Conrad Aiken): https://www.vqronline.org/fiction/silent-snow-secret-snow
By the Waters of Babylon (Stephen Vincent Benet): https://archive.org/details/bythewatersofbabylon_202001
Green Tea (J. Sheridan Le Fanu): https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/11635/pg11635-images.html
A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings (Gabriel García Márquez): https://www.ndsu.edu/pubweb/~cinichol/CreativeWriting/323/MarquezManwithWings.htm
Young Goodman Brown (Nathaniel Hawthorne): https://www.gutenberg.org/files/512/512-h/512-h.htm#chap04
Pages from a Young Girl’s Journal (Robert Aickman): https://bristolgothic.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/pages-from-a-young-girls-journal-aickman-1975.pdf
Happy reading!
A. L. Anzalone
06 Sunday Feb 2022
Tags
2016 election, essay, humor, job hunting, politics, short story
This true story was written soon after the 2016 election. I’ve never posted it here before, but since it’s my 9th anniversary keeping this blog, I thought I’d “celebrate” by posting it now because I’d forgotten about it and seeing it again made me laugh. I hope you find it somewhat funny too.
***
This is not the last thing but it’s the one thing that hit a nerve and told me that the underpinnings of a civil society had shifted. Right after the 2016 election, I applied for a job as a personal assistant to an executive of some sort and a few days later I got a phone call for a phone interview. The first thing the person interviewing me said was, “I see you’ve gone to UC Berkeley. You weren’t one of those radicals marching in the streets, were you?” Now, I wasn’t sure how to answer this question. First of all, I had graduated way after the protests I figured he was referring to. Second of all, I was proud to have attended UC Berkeley, especially since it took a fair amount of effort to be accepted, to graduate, and to pay for (I worked while attending). So, in answer to his question, I simply said, “Well, that took place long before I attended.” This man, who seemed elderly, judging from his gruff voice, then replied, “I just returned from the inauguration. It was wonderful.” Now, for the next few minutes, he took to bragging, and why he was bragging to me I had no idea. He went on and on about the inauguration, as if trying to continue basking in the awe and glory of it. All the while I was trying to think how to end this call politely (silly me). Anyway, I soon got my opportunity when he mentioned that the job also entailed taking care of group travel for hunting expeditions to Africa. Now, I’m thinking, “Is this some kind of joke or maybe a crude test of my political leanings?” Whatever it was, the last thing in the world I would ever wish to do is play a part in such a loathsome activity as that. I ended the call with “I’m really not the right person for this job.” Actually, I should say he ended the call for as soon as I said that, he hung up on me. Anyway, that was my own personal rude awakening, and it marked a turning point for me, because since that time other people, including some family members, have taken to blithely voicing biases and opinions that astound or just plain frighten me. And I keep wondering, what happened to critical thinking? What happened to civil discourse? What happened to us? I am no political pundit. I’m just a fiction writer. So the other question that comes to me time and again is this: Where are they hiding all the pods?
10 Wednesday Nov 2021
Tags
alex christofi, crime and punishment, fyodor dostoevsky, public domain review, russian literature
For those who love Dostoevsky, there is a new book out called Dostoevsky in Love, by Alex Christofi. The Public Domain Review provides an excerpt describing the moments leading up to his planned execution, all in Dostoevsky’s own words. Very chilling!
Drawing by B. Pokrovsky of Dostoevsky’s mock execution at Semonovsky Square, 1849 — Source.
27 Wednesday Mar 2019
Posted Dreams, Fiction, flash fiction, Love, Stories from underground, Uncategorized, Writing
inTags
creative writing, dream, fantasy, fiction, freud, freudian, humor, love, queen mob's teahouse, short stories, short story, subconscious
A short story of mine, titled The Machine: A Dream in One Act, is now live on Queen Mob’s Teahouse. (This story has never appeared on my WordPress blog.) If you have a chance, please take a look and let me know what you think.
It’s a little different from my usual stories as it is based on a dream I had one night. So, blame the strangeness of it on my subconscious–and perhaps also on the fact that I once worked at a psychoanalytic institute…
07 Saturday Feb 2015
Posted Authors, Books, Fiction, Short story, Writing
inSometimes, when I read a short story in one of the latest literary journals, my mind wanders. I find myself appreciating the storyteller’s craft and control but the story itself leaves me cold. The characters seem enslaved by the story’s design and, as a result, unconvincing. Or the beautiful use of language overwhelms the narrative as a whole and takes away from the movement of the story. It may be that these types of stories just weren’t written for the likes of me. In any case, whenever this happens, I often go over to my bookshelves containing books I can truthfully say I cherish, and I open one at random. Today, I selected Sherman Alexie’s The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven and read the short story, “A Train is an Order of Occurrence Designed to Lead to Some Result.” The story begins:
“Broom, dustpan, sweep, trash can,” Samuel Builds-the-Fire chanted as he showered and shaved, combed his hair into braids. Samuel was a maid at a motel on Third Avenue.”
At least for me, in so few words, so much is said, and yet hidden, and I at once trust this voice. I trust it will reveal in good time what I need to know—what I must know. And by the story’s end, I do know this character and feel for him. Even though I’m no Indian/native american (well, I guess I’m partly, if that means anything), this tale nevertheless makes me experience for deep moments at a time the journey of one Indian – the journey of one human being. So I say, thank you, Sherman Alexie, for restoring my faith in the magic of storytelling.
02 Sunday Mar 2014
What is higher consciousness? And what does it have to do with writing? Beyond perfect grammar and mellifluous sentences, beyond careful plotting and well-drawn characters, what is it that makes a writer endure through the ages? In my mind it has something to do with this writer having achieved a level of consciousness and understanding far beyond the scope of most humans. Here is one blog post I ran across recently that brings up some interesting points on the subject:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jen-grisanti/shifting-into-higher-cons_b_1414266.html
In her post Jen Grisanti writes movingly about how two individuals, Buckminster Fuller and author DeAnne Hamptom, achieved states of “transcendence,” allowing them to forego the demands of ego and arrive at a “deeper place of being.” This article made me think of the novel Les Miserables. Victor Hugo, it would seem, is one writer who achieved a profound degree of spiritual awareness. In fact, Les Miserables, is in many ways a meditation on the very experience of spiritual awakening. There is one passage in particular that I feel gives a real sense of what such a shift in consciousness must be like. It follows the scene where Jean Valjean, being held by police for having stolen silverware from a bishop, is stunned by the bishop’s response. The bishop not only denies the theft, he freely offers more “loot” to the ex-convict. “”Ah! here you are!” [the bishop exclaims], looking at Jean Valjean. “I am glad to see you. Well, but how is this? I gave you the candlesticks too, which are of silver like the rest, and for which you can certainly get two hundred francs. Why did you not carry them away with your forks and spoons?”
The following scene begins in this way:
“Jean Valjean left the town as though he were fleeing from it. He set out at a very hasty pace through the fields, taking whatever roads and paths presented themselves to him, without perceiving that he was incessantly retracing his steps. He wandered thus the whole morning, without having eaten anything and without feeling hungry. He was the prey of a throng of novel sensations. He was conscious of a sort of rage; he did not know against whom it was directed. He could not have told whether he was touched or humiliated. There came over him at moments a strange emotion which he resisted and to which he opposed the hardness acquired during the last twenty years of his life. This state of mind fatigued him. He perceived with dismay that the sort of frightful calm which the injustice of his misfortune had conferred upon him was giving way within him. He asked himself what would replace this. At times he would have actually preferred to be in prison with the gendarmes, and that things should not have happened in this way; it would have agitated him less. Although the season was tolerably far advanced, there were still a few late flowers in the hedge-rows here and there, whose odor as he passed through them in his march recalled to him memories of his childhood. These memories were almost intolerable to him, it was so long since they had recurred to him [Chapter XIII: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/135/135-h/135-h.htm#link2HCH0020 ].”
The scene goes on to build upon this small awakening and, piece by piece, emotion by emotion, offers, I believe, one of the most mesmerizing accounts ever written of a man achieving enlightenment. And though this awakening occurs to a fictional character, it could not have been written without the author himself having reached a higher level of consciousness. Moreover, as Jen Grisanti notes in her blog, writers that are able to put into story their own transcending moments inspire us all “to connect to what they write.” It is this connection on the deepest spiritual level, I believe, that enables these writers to live on and on.
10 Sunday Nov 2013
Tags
I believe the most well-known story by Conrad Aiken is “Silent Snow, Secret Snow,” which is a mesmerizing tour de force of storytelling. There is another story of his, however, which I find even more compelling: “Mr. Arcularis.” I discovered it a long time ago in a collection of fantasy tales, and every time I reread the story, it never fails to work its magic over me. There’s something about the story’s strangely light, yet mysterious tone and the sweet, befuddled nature of its main character. If you’ve never read “Mr. Arcularis” and would like to, you can find it in this collection on the Internet Archive:
06 Sunday Oct 2013
Here’s an interesting study I ran across regarding the benefits of reading literary fiction as opposed to popular fiction and nonfiction. I personally have nothing against so-called popular fiction, though I tend to enjoy old classics myself (oh, my goodness, how the lives of Anna Karenina, Vronsky and Levin swallowed me whole) and maybe this is the reason why: