fwriction

From Cal Morgan, of Harper-Perennial’s Fifty-Two Stories:

I have long been fascinated by the idea that an entire story—potential, conflict, joy, agony, completion—could be contained in a snapshot. In this story from his luminous debut collection, The Secret Lives of People in Love, Simon Van Booy proves not only that it can, but also that the snapshot itself is optional. Words are enough.

Because reading Van Booy’s work is not something to be done once and left, I present “French Artist Killed in Sunday’s Earthquake” as today’s Story of the Day in the hopes that you’ll read and reread it over the weekend. His collection Love Begins in Winter, along with his previous collection, feel like celebrations of both language and humanity. If there’s a poetry to fiction writing, Van Booy has mastered it:

“She could sense the darkness that encapsulated her. She could not feel her body, as though during the fall, her soul had slipped out and 
lay waiting for the exact moment when it would disappear from the world.”