Fiction
Realistic fiction and a dollop of magical realism.
Genre
Science fiction and fantasy.
Live
Improvised stories told live around a virtual Halloween campfire.
Poetry
Just a few samples, from formal and free verse to limericks.
Lit crit
Essays on various literary topics.
All contents of this site are
© Copyright 1998-2010
Raphael Koster.
All rights reserved.
The views expressed here are my own, and not necessarily endorsed by any former or current employer.
These stories are a mish-mash of the fantastical, the science-fictional, and the magic realist. A lot of them are pretty unpolished--they're all at least ten years old, at this point, and some are older than that (see if you can pick out the one that dates back to high school...!)
I have a couple of rejection slips, from Fantasy and Science Fiction and Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. Not for one of these, for ones that I wouldn't show to anyone anymore.
Warning: these get pretty whimsical in places. And they're not really what I'd call "done" in any case.
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$19.95. This one is very old. Very very old. A "junior in high school" sort of old. It wears its New Wave SF influences very openly on its sleeve, and I can only plead forgiveness for intemperate youth. It's about the day when you can buy someone else's body to wear for twenty bucks--from the point of view of the original body's owner.
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Heifetz. Let's say you were a dysfunctional wanna-be writer kid who one day found a giant green alien from Mars while walking in the New England woods....
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Naming the Boundaries. I never did a second draft on this one, so it's very rough. I can't really spoil the ending, but I will say that the problem with this one is that it gets preachy. I usually have to revise subtlety into a story...
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The Green of Spring. This magical realist story was inspired by a Sports Illustrated story I read while in a doctor's office, about an athlete who had promised his wife that he's build her a house with the money from his sports career--but then the wife died, and he kept building her house. This one was in my undergraduate thesis, a book called An Extended Family. If you read it close, you should see linkages to some of the stories in the Fiction section.
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