John Allman

A Fine Romance & Other Stories John Allman

Fiction. A FINE ROMANCE & OTHER STORIES focuses on love relationships of one kind or another and involves a variety of intertextuality or implied texts within texts. For example, one story interacts with Kafka's Metamorphosis. Another with the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Another with three films by Jean-Luc Godard. The title story, about a romance novelist, has the text of the novel being written interacting with the real time text the narrating novelist is living in. There's a touch of epistolary text in a story about a woman writing a letter from jail to her sister. There's a story about a man reading the novel his wife has been writing about her marriage to that man now reading the narrative in secret and on the computer. And in the final story, there is the text of a woman writing postcards to her husband, while she does a world tour all by herself--the husband worrying if those postcard texts will cease and his wife never come back. These stories are vivid and varied in their lyric realism or, at times, urgent fantasy.