SHORT NOVELS (with titles & enhancements)
(Any number of which may be selected for publication, in any order, ideally designed to appear with just a few stories, if not only one, to a printed page, even in empty spaces at the ends of other writer's stories)
ADVERTISING
He relished paternity suits not as threats upon his integrity but as opportunities to publicize his potency.
EXTRA!
I've just been handed a news flash that says, "There will be no more news."
BETTERMENT
A virgin at twenty, she was a snob at thirty and a spinster at forty.
APEXEPA
In the story a that is palindrome is that a story the inn.
CONFUSD
I'm a man buried inside a man buried inside a woman all wanting to get out.
DIE KUNST DER FUGUE
He spent the day listening in sequence to all the versions he owned of J. S. Bach's Die Kunst der Fugue, crying every time the last triple fugue ended in mid-phrase, its incompleteness signaling the composer's death.
HAUNTIN
Obsessed with your face, I see you everywhere I go; I see it everywhere I look.
ETHEREAL
Better to make us performers seem ethereal, he filmed only our reflections on water.
FORTUNE
Soon after he thought himself gay, he had the good fortune of meeting the man with whom he would spend the rest of his life.
MARRYING
She married the sort of man whom her wealthy parents wanted for her husband and then divorced him in favor of another man who would be, she thought, even more acceptable to them.
INSTABILITY
He changed his home address so often that I no longer know where he is, or was.
INTERPRETATION
Any word I write can be interpreted in seven ways, or seventy-seven, or seven hundred seventy-seven.
THERAPY
Thinking she could cure every philanderer of infidelity, she wouldn't forgive herself for ever being wrong.
PERFECTION
I write a sentence and rewrite it, and then rewrite it again, until I have a string of words as perfect as the one you're now reading.
TRAVELING
The road on which he traveled receded precipitously before him.
LOCATION
He stood on a spot from which everything important to him in the world was equidistant.
SCHEMING
As long as he made it his principal interpersonal strategy to tell his superiors whatever it was they wanted to hear, he would never emerge from behind their shadow, disqualifying himself from ever becoming a leader.
A FAVORITE SIGN
He could tell from how she clasped her arms across her chest, moving them up and down as she was talking to me, that she must be taking an interest, a serious interest, in him.
UNEVEN STRENGTHS
They are a million, and we are only three.
WRITING A NOVEL
Whenever I begin a novel, my wife invariably writes and rewrites until she completes it.
REMARRIAGES
On the same day that he married his first ex-wife's daughter by an earlier marriage, his second ex-wife married his son from his first marriage.
CONCENTRATION
Founding companies that required her constant attention, she spurned the leisure that her inheritance afforded her by buying herself into workaday slavery.
WRITING ABOUT ONESELF
Authoring a book-length autobiography that is unauthorized, I expect, once it appears, to file a defamatory suit against myself.
IMITATION
He lied because his colleagues lied, he cheated because they cheated, and he stole because he could see everyone around him successfully getting away with theft.
SECURITY
She wired the fence around her house to shock not only animals and burglars but relatives who hoped they would not be forgotten in her will.
HEARING HOME
Returning home for the first time in two decades, she was continually surprised to discover that most of the people she heard on the streets were speaking the language of her dreams.
PUTTING HIS WIFE TO WORK
What he wanted to do was exploit his wife's instinctive sadism by putting her in charge of surreptitious assassinations.
REFUSING PROFIT
Allowing no self-pity, he refused compensation for injustice.
LITERARY ACCOUNTING
The "bottom line" in literature is not how much money you earn before you die but how many readers you have after you're gone.
MARITAL PREFERENCE
She preferred being married to a man who lived and worked in another town.
DEBASING
He was such a compulsive, intimidating beggar that every night with him resembled Halloween, and every woman beside him looked like a witch.
MEASURING AFFECTION
While the doctor mentioned the names of my past lovers, several electronic measuring devices, attached by wires to different parts of my body, registered different responses that the doctor then recorded in his book.
SELF-DOCUMENTATION
Though he took a year to paint a picture, he shot each day a photograph of himself before his work in progress, knowing that the snapshots would be exhibited chronologically besides the painting.
OVERWORKING
He took a perverse pleasure in getting to the office before any of his employees and then staying later than they did, even though his mid-days were customarily spent sleeping with one of his three secretaries.
MISCALCULATION
What he hadn't anticipated, in his greatest vision for his family, was a daughter who would never marry and thus never have any children and a son who would dissipate his inheritance in homosexual charities.
EPISTEMOLOGY
You can observe a lot by just looking.
NEWSFLASH
Just before me is a newsflash that says, “There will be no more news.”
DUPLICITY
As a fake professor who was also a professional faker, he was full of ruses to keep us from recognizing how ignorant he was.
ADDITION
Nothing plus nothing equals nothing, while something plus something equals more than one thing.
JOB
She worked as a foul-weather birdcage cleaner.
ANTICIPATION
I feel like I've spent my life waiting by the telephone to hear from women who were scarcely interested in calling me back.
Her new lovers had to rearrange their daily schedules if they were to stay lovers at all. AWESOME Our father showed up with a new girl friend one weekend and another the following Saturday, both of whom he would escort to our guest room where he would spend the night as well. FRAUD Even though she was a full professor at a well-known college, no one respected either her writing or talking.
FLEXIBILITY
DEPARTURE
Overhearing the scheme for a monstrous crime, I left my newspaper where it was likely to be found--with the men at the airport, sitting on their suitcases and looking at the ceiling as though they were waiting for their savior to come.
MEMENTOS
Every day, for fifty years of their marriage, they set up a tripod and took a photograph of themselves smiling at each other.
PLEDGE
I belong to a secret society about which I can write nothing more.
FECUNDITY
He wrote two thousand different poems in an hour.
CHARISMA
So great was his power over women that wives would leave husbands, parents, and children, as well as homes, possessions and friends, to go away with him.
SELF-DELUSION
Her academic scorecard showed that she received an A in every college course she ever took.
PLAGIARISM
She stole his best ideas and called them her own--even the idea of stealing his best ideas and calling them her own.
MIRACLES
You'll know the millennium has come when vinegar turns to wine.
INHERITANCE
Her entire estate passed from some one who died onto some one who died onto someone who died onto someone who died leaving nothing.
Bio: Individual entries on Richard Kostelanetz's work in several fields appear in various editions of Readers Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers, Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature, Contemporary Poets, Contemporary Novelists, Postmodern Fiction, Webster's Dictionary of American Writers, The HarperCollins Reader's Encyclopedia of American Literature, Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, Directory of American Scholars, Who's Who in America, Who's Who in the World, Who's Who in American Art, NNDB.com, Wikipedia.com, and Britannica.com, among other distinguished directories. Otherwise, he survives in New York, where he was born, unemployed and thus overworked.