the evolution of bruno littlemore by benjamin hale

And “The Minus World” I put last because I wanted the last paragraph of that story to be the end of the book. “Don’t Worry Baby” I put first because it’s suspenseful-it’s an aggressive bang of an opening, like beginning an album with your loudest, fastest song. For example, Fred in “If I had Possession Over Judgment Day” is a “fat artist” who precedes the “Fat Artist” Peter from “The Minus World” has echoes of Julian, who never gets a chance to really speak in “The Leftovers.” How did you approach ordering the collection? I think I read that you said the order was chronological, but how did you arrive at that final decision?īH: It’s basically chronological. With all these stories, I wrote the first drafts fairly quickly and then spent years tinkering with them.ĪG: I found myself really interested in finding connections and progressions and foils between the characters and stories in the collection. “Venus at her Mirror” I first wrote in 2012, and “Beautiful Beautiful Beautiful Beautiful Boy” grew out of a theater project I was working on with some collaborators in the spring of 2013-the play never really materialized, but I salvaged that story out of it. “The Minus World” I also wrote pretty quickly, sometime in 2011 (it’s the last story in the collection because I like its final note. I think I wrote the first draft of “Leftovers” in one day in the summer of 2009. I think I wrote the first draft of “The Fat Artist” concurrently with Bruno (he has a Bruno-like voice, and also I was thinking constantly about Kafka at the time). So, I wrote the first drafts of those two before Bruno. I bet those two have gone through hundreds of “drafts.” I would take them out and work on them some more every once in a while. The first story, “Don’t Worry Baby” is almost as old. We reached out to Hale to talk about his writing process and his new collection, which was published last week.Īnabel Graff: How did this collection come about? How did you approach the transition from writing a novel of epic scope ( The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore) to these stories?īenjamin Hale: These stories slowly formed over the course of the last ten years or so. I wrote the first draft of “If I had Possession Over Judgment Day” in my senior year of college. What at first may read as absurd becomes meaningful and then moving through Hale’s skillful and playful storytelling. In his first story collection, Benjamin Hale introduces us to characters who inhabit the margins of society: an expat outlaw revolutionary trying to find her way home, a dominatrix confronting a new possible role as mother, a performance artists eating himself towards death.

The evolution of bruno littlemore by benjamin hale