As someone whose absorbed a lot of medieval fiction and poetry, it's heartening to know that metaphor and allegory are still alive in the modern short story. Having finished McSweeney's collection of posthumously realized Fitzgerald ideas, nearly everyone had conflicts and figures that could easily be read metaphorically. Especially the two stories based off of the idea "Girl and giraffe."
The first of these two is easily placed among medieval and renaissance beast fables, and the second seems to have something to say about English colonialism in Africa.
The weirdest in the collection, though - and the shortest - is definitely "For Now, I Was Tall," Diane Williams' entry. This one's based on the idea "Play about a whole lot of old people - terrible things happen to them and they don't really care." With hardly enough text to cover a single face of a single page, and more mentions of "President of the United States" than a presidential address introduction on 24 hour loop, it's dense to the point of incomprehensible. It reads like it's about a woman who's dying which I suppose is terrible, and she doesn't seem to care, but so little is concrete that it's difficult to pin much about it down.
On the whole, this is a solid collection of short stories. Hopefully, it's a good introduction to the madness that is form-constrained Oulipo writing coming up in part two of McSweeney's Three Books Held Within by Magnets.
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