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The selections from "Silas Flannery: A Reader" are my recreation of the world of that character from Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler, placed in an oddly Oulipian world. (This comes from my time in a workshop with Gilbert Sorrentino.) The pieces are meant to be read sequentially. First, Flannery's "Don Quixote, Author of Pierre Menard," a book review. Second, Rolhad Mobol's "Reading Itself Myself," a piece of criticism on Flannery. Third, Flannery's "How Rolhad Mobol wrote one of his essays," a dissection and refutation of the preceding piece. Each of these has been composed according to certain Oulipian games, with a few anagrams thrown in (Gorgeous J. Bliser ~ Jorge Luis Borges, for instance). None of the pieces
incorporates citation (other than citation of my own fictional citations), but the third piece was inspired by Calvino's kiss-and-tell essay "How I Wrote One of My Books." I hope you'll find that the selections stand on their own apart from Oulipian techniques. Of the remaining two essays, "ZLH is reading If on a winter's night a traveler" entertains the notion of a 'close reading' of Chapter One, and "Pre-Millennium Tension" places Milan Kundera in the same room as Lotaria from If on a winter's night, with a guest appearance by Flannery thrown in for good measure. I hope you enjoy! Zachary L Hammerman
Selections from Silas Flannery: A Reader Don Quixote, Author of Pierre
Menard, by Silas Flannery Essays Zachary L Hammerman is reading If on a winter's night a
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