794 Mini Sagas

There are many more words than you could ever wish to use! I taunt you with those words. I bellow them out into the air within your hearing in order to humiliate you. That is why you avoid me, because I burden you with so many words, heaping them upon your head, or flinging them after you as you hurry away from me, fine, well-turned, latinate, polysyllabic, Miltonic words of the kind faithfully and carefully stowed away only in dictionaries. That is where I live my rich and fulfilling life, within the pages of many dictionaries, with my torch and my eyeglass, digging ever deeper into dictionaries, preferably the old ones. I spend whole days together down there, a deep-cast miner of words. Clothes mean nothing to me. Abluting this body means nothing to me - let it stink to high heaven! I have no time for such irrelevancies. There is too much steady accumulation to be done, and each day offers me twenty-four hours only in which to do it. What am I to do with these words now that you have refused to listen to me, now that you have left me here to my own devices? The question is an irrelevance. I do not need to justify this pursuit. When they are all present in front of − and behind and beside − me, I need do nothing but admire their magnificence as they stretch away and away from me. These words speak for themselves.

Can you describe these seven hundred and ninety-four paragraphs as a collection of stories each of that length? Or are they more glimpses into the thoughts and feelings of other people: fleeting moments in complicated, or simple, lives? In modern jargon, might they be called prose poems?

No two readers will interpret them the same, and probably not as the author envisaged - but isn't that the point? Doesn't fiction take on a life of its own once you set it free?

It is perhaps a book more for dipping in and out of than one to read end-to-end, and depending on your mood, the weather, the day of the week, you will see something different, something new, and something outside of the story itself.