Dave's Fiction Warehouse

I became a fan of Joyce Carol Oates' short fiction in November 2003, when one of her stories appeared in the same issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine as one of mine. If you missed it, too bad. Though it pains me to say so, I guess I can now concede that her story was better. But that's the reason I picked up The Museum of Dr. Moses , her latest collection of short stories, as soon as I saw it. That and the subtitle: Tales of Mystery and Suspense . As you may have guessed, I'm a sucker for just that sort of yarn. Ms. Oates does not disappoint. With the exception of the almost upbeat opening piece, "Hi! Howya Doin!" (written as a single, very long sentence about a particularly annoying jogger), these are some dark, dread-filled stories that tend to linger long after you've read them. The creepiest thing about them is that they are so utterly believable. Oates has a firm grasp of what drives normal people to do abnormal things, and she is such a master...

The other night I was still tossing and turning at 1:30 a.m., as is often the case, so I grabbed the remote. The chance of finding something decent to watch at that hour is right up there with winning it all at Powerball, but this time I got lucky: Sexy Beast was on one of the HBO channels. This is the movie to watch if you always think of Gandhi whenever you think of Ben Kingsley. His performance here is nothing less than anti-Gandhi -- utterly crude, ruthless and intimidating. I don't know if he and costar Ray Winstone were friends off the set, but if they never spoke again I can understand why. Winstone plays soft-in-the-middle ex-criminal "Gal" Dove, who is trying to enjoy his retirement in sunny Spain. Kingsley is the lean, lethal and certifiable Don Logan, who wishes to enlist Gal for a risky bank heist back in London. Let's just say Don is not the sort of man who takes no for an answer. This is a great movie, with high tension throughout, but be warned that i...

As a younger man I was a great fan of Ernest Hemingway's early stories -- stuff like "The Three Day Blow" and "The Big Two-Hearted River." And like most young men who think about writing, I shamelessly aped his style in community-college writing classes, cobbling together a bunch of pointless stories that I never got around to finishing. Only later did I hear the old joke about American writers consisting of two groups: Those trying to write like Hemingway, and those trying not to. I didn't worship Hemingway's longer works quite so much. In fact, the only ones I'd read until recently were A Farewell to Arms and The Old Man and the Sea . But with the upcoming Paris trip in mind, I decided to try A Moveable Feast . In case you haven't read it, it's a surprisingly sentimental memoir of Hemingway's life in Paris in the 1920s -- the exact time and place he was writing those short stories I used to admire. I picked it up for its descriptions o...

Here's the kind of raucous good times you can have in Second Life : nothing like a few cartoon marionettes spazzing out on a pixelated dance floor that looks like it was rendered in Microsoft Paint sometime in 1995. Nice title, too (see link ). They have virtual dances in Second Life, but they don't have virtual classes in remedial spelling. Evidently they do have virtual bookstores, though. Booktwo.org mentions one run by somebody named Coelacanth Seurat (that's another thing to hate about Second Life; everybody has names like Coelacanth Seurat. Why? If you can't spell "dancing," the word "Coelacanth" is not going to roll effortlessly off the keyboard either, is it?) Anyway, here's Coelacanth's take on selling virtual books in a virtual world: “In RL a bookstore is a place to browse and buy books & magazines. But in SL I think the definition has to be expanded a bit: compensating authors as they desire, but focusing on aggregating SL te...

It's good to see Hollywood finally talking about making good movies again. I'm referring, of course, to "Dallas," which is technically the last American television series not to have been made into a feature film (except for " My Mother The Car ," a Viacom release scheduled for 2009). Variety reports John Travolta has been signed to play J.R. Ewing. That's some casting genius, since Travolta radiates just the sort of overfed smugness and limited range that Larry Hagman brought to the TV show. Not sure about Shirley MacLaine as Miss Ellie (what, Judy Dench was not available?) or Meg Ryan as Sue Ellen. Ah, Meg. It's but a short step from here to the Home Shopping Network. How are those collagen lips holding up? No word on who will play the randy Lucy, a role that earned Charlene Tilton the affectionate moniker "Stumpy." No matter. I've already reserved balcony tickets, even though I'm kind of worried that it's now being cast a...