Death of Charlotte Bronte and Flight by Sherman Alexie

My short story, "The Death of Charlotte Bronte," appears in this year's Clackamas Literary Review. The story is about the repeated appropriations of the Bronte's by first Charlotte (who acquired Anne, Emily, and Branwell after their deaths), and then Elizabeth Gaskell who wrote the biography of Charlotte Bronte after Charlotte's death, and then writers since then. I wrote the story in 1999 as part of Rebecca Brown's Brontesaurus, a day long celebration of the Bronte's and closet writers.

A review of Flight by Sherman Alexie appears in the the WaterBridge Review.

Zits, the narrator of Sherman Alexie's seventeenth book, is a teenager who is tough in the long tradition of American angry young men, such as Huckleberry Finn, Holden Caulfield, and Russell Banks's Bone. In this tradition the narrator is self-damning, self-hating, and comic. "I'm ashamed that I look like a bag of zits tied to a broomstick," Zits says. These stories tell the American myth of self-determination: anyone, in America, these stories say, can become anything.

Posted by mattbriggs at October 20, 2007 8:06 AM