Varieties of the Fantastic in Fiction

Here’s an interesting snippet from Washington Post Book Editor Ron Charles’s email newsletter: The next audiobook you hear might sound like the voice of an actor you recognize — but the narrator could actually be a robot. A British company called DeepZen has developed “emotive voice technology” that uses artificial intelligence to replicate particular human […]

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In “Difficult at Parties,” there is a sense of ambiguity about the narrator’s recent trauma, although just enough is given to glimpse into what may have happened. She is bruised, there is pain, a cop calls, and it seems like there is a care taken concerning the sex life she has with Paul. It is […]

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Steven Millhauser’s “History of a Disturbance” has a sense of unease and tension from the beginning. Though nothing fantastic happens directly (everything strange seems to be in the narrator’s head), Millhauser’s use of language, syntax, and point-of-view provide readers with a sense of something that just isn’t quite right. The story begins in the second-person: […]

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Almost every story we’ve read so far by Steven Millhauser in Dangerous Laughter has centered around a modern, suburban town slowly slipping into madness. It may not even have to be the town itself, but rather just the town’s residents. In the short story “Dangerous Laughter”, we witness a small town fixated on this idea of […]

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  The narrator immediately establishes a personal connection to the reader by referring to the reader as “you” and “Elsa,” thereby defining the reader as his wife in order to strengthen his case for silence. In addition, this establishes an intimacy and history between the reader and the narrator. The narrator struggles with two problems: […]

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