Introduction: Author! Author!

Literary Review, Fall, 1998 by Thomas E. Kennedy

I began the anthology with Robert Coover, for what could be more natural than to begin with a story titled "Beginnings" which opens,

   In order to get started, he went to live alone on an island and shot
   himself. His blood, unable to resist a final joke, splattered the cabin
   walls in a pattern that read: It is important to begin when everything is
   already over.

(And how interesting to learn that Mr. Coover's island may be metaphor, but is no mere metaphor!)

And what more natural way to end than with W.D. Wetherell's wonderful celebration of the continuum of telling that is our civilization reaching forward through the generations to come?

In between, you will find what I consider an amazing and rich gathering of stories and revelations. There are stories of human morals (Andre Dubus), of public and private identity (Susan Dodd), of the haunting weight of family (Lance Olsen), of the hard challenges facing youth (Duff Brenna), of the bizarre details of the surface of our contemporary so-called culture (Harold Jaffe), and some of the bizarre details of the world of the past (Askold Melnyczuk). You will meet ambitious policemen (Gordon Weaver), wandering authors (Francois Camoin), broken families (Pamela Painter), God (Thomas E. Kennedy), and a carnival of a very special sort (Gladys Swan).

The stories are funny, moving, instructive, frightening, awe-inspiring, and after each story the reader is offered a personal meeting with the author, affording a glimpse into the how, the why, the meaning and the mystery, opening it up so that we might enter a little deeper into its secrets.

Welcome to the sources.

Thomas E. Kennedy's books include five volumes of fiction (the novels, Crossing Borders, 1990; A Weather of the Eye, 1996; and The Book of Angels, 1997; and the story collections Unreal City, 1996, and Drive, Dive, Dance & Fight, 1997) as well as four volumes of literary criticism, most notably studies of the short fiction of Andre Dubus, 1988, and Robert Coover, 1992--both published by Twayne/Macmillan. In addition he has edited anthologies of New Danish Fiction (published as a special issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction in 1995) and New Irish Poetry and Prose (a special issue of The Literary Review, 1997). Kennedy teaches at the Ploughshares/Emerson College International Fiction Writing Seminar in the Netherlands. He lives in Denmark, where he serves as International Editor of Cimarron Review and Potpourri, and Advisory Editor for The Literary Review, to which he has contributed fiction, translations, essays, and special issues.