The Nightingales of Troy
Many of my favorite fiction writers started out as poets. When I read a story I am much more interested in how the story is told than the story itself. The stories that come from poets tend to have a musical quality that must stem from paying extremely close attention to language.
Alice Fulton, who has been awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship for her poetry, is debuting her first fiction collection, The Nightingales of Troy: Connected Stories.
In an interview with The Boston Globe, the author is asked whether she considered writing this collection of short stories as a novel:
No. My initial intention was to learn to write fiction by writing short stories, because I had this notion that I could write them and throw them away if they didn’t work. It would be much harder to discard a novel. This was my way of learning different narrative techniques as well, because the short story allows that, whereas a novel would have demanded continuity of tone and style. I had a vague intention of evoking the linguistic qualities of particular epochs. “Happy Dust” has some qualities of 19th-century writing; the 1920s story is spare, more modern; the 1930s one seems to have a WPA feeling; and “The Real Eleanor Rigby” I tried to make as effervescent as a lava lamp.
The rest of the interview can be read here.
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