David Galef – författare

In Brevity, David Galef provides a guide to writing flash fiction, from tips on technique to samples by canonical and contemporary authors to provocative prompts that inspire powerful stories in a little space. Galef traces the genre back to its varied origins, from the short-short to nanofiction, with examples that include vignettes, prose poems, character sketches, fables, lists, twist stories, surrealism, and metafiction. The authors range from the famous, such as Colette and Borges, to today's voices, like Roxane Gay and Bruce Holland Rogers. A writer and longtime creative writing teacher, Galef also shows how flash fiction skills translate to other types of writing. Brevity is an indispensable resource for anyone working in this increasingly popular form. For more information, see davidgalef.com/brevity.

In Brevity, David Galef provides a guide to writing flash fiction, from tips on technique to samples by canonical and contemporary authors to provocative prompts that inspire powerful stories in a little space. Galef traces the genre back to its varied origins, from the short-short to nanofiction, with examples that include vignettes, prose poems, character sketches, fables, lists, twist stories, surrealism, and metafiction. The authors range from the famous, such as Colette and Borges, to today's voices, like Roxane Gay and Bruce Holland Rogers. A writer and longtime creative writing teacher, Galef also shows how flash fiction skills translate to other types of writing. Brevity is an indispensable resource for anyone working in this increasingly popular form. For more information, see davidgalef.com/brevity.

For every Hamlet, there is a supporting cast; for every Mrs. Dalloway, an entire realm of subordinate portraits. Yet if literary criticism cares at all about significant detail, emergent patterns, and the subtleties in narrative, flat and minor characters are crucial to an understanding of the fictional process itself.Beginning with E. M. Forster's landmark study of flat and round characters, this book is both a critical and writerly examination of the species: Why are certain minor characters so salient in readers' minds, and why are flat characters often so comic? Is a name enough to create a character, and if so, what is the vanishing point of characterization? The walking allegory, the narrator, the disrupter, the doppelgänger—how are they used, and to what effect? The Supporting Cast first explores the theoretical limits of character, from structuralist taxonomies to reader-response concerns, with examples culled from a wide range of literature. The author then applies these concepts, in chapters of sustained analysis, to works of Conrad, Forster, and Woolf. The work also provides comments on flat and minor characters in other media and a full-scale character index of Woolf's Jacob's Room.

Even Monkeys Fall From Trees: The Wit and Wisdom of Japanese Proverbs, with a foreword by Edward G. Seidensticker, is a collection of the hundred most common Japanese proverbs, with direct translations and their English equivalents.A delightful window into the heart of everyday Japan, Even Monkeys Fall From Trees is an indispensable guide for the traveler, student, or businessman—or anyone curious about the culture of Japan.

"Destroy a nation, but its mountains and rivers remain."—Japanese proverbThis is a collection of 200 Japanese proverbs with illustrations and explanations for each saying. Japanese Proverbs: Wit and Wisdom is a delightfully illustrated compilation of traditional Japanese sayings and maxims. Some of the classic Japanese quotes and quotations, like "Fall down seven times, get up eight," capture the dogged perseverance of the Japanese heart. Others, such as "A red lacquer dish needs no decoration" illuminate both a universal truth and Japan''s unique, aesthetic traditions. Japanese Proverbs: Wit and Wisdom has proverbs of great cultural significance as well as proverbs on matters of daily life and customs. Pleasing to expert and new-comer alike, the 200 traditional proverbs in this unique collection are presented in Japanese calligraphy form, along with direct English translations. Similar proverbs are given from English, and the sumi-e style ink drawings are a delight in their own right. Amateurs and Japanese language enthusiasts alike will speak Japanese with the verve and nuance of a native when they use these apt and witty expressions.

Obsession takes over two lives: one brazenly, the other more sneakily in this witty black comedy of lust, academia, and Southern manners. When bachelor history professor, Max Finster, arrives in the university community of Oxford, Mississippi, and moves in next door to Don and Susan Shapiro, all of their lives head for dramatic change. Narrator Don, a professor of English, gradually becomes fascinated by Max, his mysterious past, polymathic mind, chameleon personality and strange sexual agenda. Max gets busy ravishing a series of obese women, each larger than the previous one, as Don theorizes and looks on, sometimes literally, via a peephole he has drilled through the apartment wall.   This sordid activity is set against a panorama of outwardly wholesome college life, but Don’s insider perspective digs beneath the facades both of professorial pretense and the institutionalized civility of the South. First-time novelist Galef, himself a tenured professor , writes knowingly of the academic scene, sparing no one, and sheds a whole new light on the subtleties of male bonding.

Gou ni itte wa, gou ni shitagae, runs an old Japanese proverb: Obey the customs of the village you enter.   Just don’t overdo things.   It may already be too late for Cricket Collins, a recent Ivy League graduate who travels to Osaka for his first real job as an English instructor. The time is late 1970s, with Japan quickly becoming the new find-yourself region that India was to the backpack set in the 1960s. From pachinko parlors to paper cranes, tea ceremonies to translation problems, everything is entrancing to Cricket, at first, as he throws himself headfirst into a two-thousand-year-old culture.   But soon he gets fired from his teaching job at Kansai Gakuin for petty theft, and on a brief trip to Korea he becomes embroiled in a sexual misadventure with painful after-effects. Spinning slowly out of orbit in his free-floating expatriate existence, he starts to lose touch with family, friends, and reality. It isn’t until he returns home to America that he begins to turn Japanese with a vengeance.  Turning Japanese is as much about the allure of a foreign culture as it is about the divided existence of an expat and the terrors of ones own mind. Be careful of breaking down the barriers between two cultures: the breakdown you create may be your own.

Tony Mazza is no stranger to bad days; in fact, they often seem to define his life, including stints at a real estate agency, a bike shop, and a bar. After his latest job, as a hospital orderly, he faces jail time for driving off in a stolen ambulance. “ Where did I go wrong?” he wonders as he thinks back on his failed relationships, a disastrous investment, and family challenges dating back to high school and earlier...all the way back to his birth, as recounted by his much-put-upon mother. Where I Went Wrong is Tony'' s story, a novel that blends action with rueful reflection, examining the complexities of failure and success. It poses the question of why some people lose out while others get away with little short of murder, offering a narrative both comic and profoundly serious.

David Galef''s stories, whether longer or as tiny one-page wonders, can contain both humor and fear. In this work the ordinary slips easily into the allegorical, into the dream and sometimes into the nightmare, often leaving the reader with moments of narrative that will stick like a sharp-edged image from a memorable poem or painting. Galef''s vision blossoms in a twenty-first century America, but its roots stretch back to the terror behind the oldest folk legends.

David Galef has published fifteen books. His awards include a Fulbright fellowship. A co-founder of the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Mississippi, he is now a professor of English at Montclair State University.