I am finally done with cutting and glueing the pop ups for my book “the city”, and I started with cutting and printing the text. (Turned out I make 24 books in the edition plus two copies for exhibition and handling that are not for sale.)

So it is about time that I talk about the text. Or rather a text fragment, artificial text fragment, maybe. I wrote a couple of those, and I struggle with naming a literary genre. I used to call it a short short story,  for the simple reason that it is significantly shorter than a short story. However, it turns out that this is already defined, and my texts don’t really fit into the description. So I call them fragments. They are pieces of text that are supposed to hint at a bigger story, I want them to sound like you open a book and pick a random paragraph, and I hope they are written well enough so that you would like to read the whole story. I am after that itch that you would like to know more but you just don’t have the book at hand.

Here is an example that I like. I wrote it about two years ago:

Smirk

“Ah, I see! So you had not the slightest idea whether the tincture you were selling had any effects at all, whether they’d be good or bad?”

He seemed relieved, and with the air of finally being understood said: “Yes!”

“But nevertheless you wrote ‘Long Life Serum’ on the bottle. Don’t you think people might derive a claim out of this?”

“I cannot look into people’s mind, can I?” and with this he allowed himself a smirk, obviously thinking he would get out of this mess after all.

So, “the city” is an artificial fragment like that one. It is about: The City and about two people on a search. On an abstract level it is about culture differences or culture shock. And I hope it is funny. Hubby at least laughed when he read it.

I hope I made you a little curious to read it. And if you have a better idea what the literary genre is, please let me know.

Eine deutsche Übersetzung folgt noch. Bitte entschuldigt, dass sie jetzt noch nicht hier ist – ich  bin zu müde, um jetzt noch weiterzuschreiben. Am Sonntag mehr. Bis dahin!