{"id":12254,"date":"2007-11-18T21:18:33","date_gmt":"2007-11-19T02:18:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/?p=12254"},"modified":"2014-01-07T21:17:41","modified_gmt":"2014-01-08T02:17:41","slug":"first-review-of-my-story-almost-the-last-story-by-almost-the-last-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/2007\/11\/18\/first-review-of-my-story-almost-the-last-story-by-almost-the-last-man\/","title":{"rendered":"First review of my story “Almost the Last Story by Almost the Last Man”"},"content":{"rendered":"

My story “Almost the Last Story by Almost the Last Man, just out in PostScripts<\/i> 12<\/a>, has been reviewed—as favorably as one could ever hope for—by Val Grimm at The Fixx<\/i><\/a>:<\/p>\n

Although it is uneven, this issue is worth buying and keeping for its most promising stories, two of which, \u201cAlmost The Last Story By Almost The Last Man\u201d by Scott Edelman and \u201cGhost Technology From The Sun\u201d by Paul Jessup, show thoughtfulness and literary craft that deserve special recognition and remembrance.<\/p>\n

The unnamed narrator (I suspect his name is Walter) of \u201cAlmost The Last Story By Almost The Last Man\u201d is a writer doing research who seeks refuge in the rare book vault of a library, which is attacked by zombies. Walled in with his books, he struggles to comprehend what is happening by telling stories, mostly of what he imagines is happening in the world outside the library. His meta-narrative is an exploration of the impulse to write and why telling stories is human. All the vignettes our male Scheherazade formulates to forestall and forget the inevitable involve affection or dedication of one kind or another: bonds between people, or between humans and zombies. Death doesn\u2019t part his husbands and wives in their love or hatred; mothers adore their strange children; priests attend to their flocks; and survivors seek other survivors. The unflinching mayhem of this story is heartrending rather than perverse or disgusting, as life is destroyed and, tattered, continues in unlife. Again and again, our narrator imagines a man on a mountain, who has never heard a whimper of the chaos below, poking in the dirt with a stick and talking to his son, a darkly hopeful image which recalls the torturer\u2019s horse scratching its innocent behind on a tree in W.H. Auden\u2019s \u201cMus\u00e9e des Beaux Arts.\u201d<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That’s the first time I’ve ever been favorably compared to W.H. Auden!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My story “Almost the Last Story by Almost the Last Man, just out in PostScripts 12, has been reviewed—as favorably as one could ever hope for—by Val Grimm at The Fixx: Although it is uneven, this issue is worth buying and keeping for its most promising stories, two of which, \u201cAlmost The Last Story By […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[29,307],"class_list":["post-12254","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-my-writing","tag-postscripts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12254","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12254"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12254\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12256,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12254\/revisions\/12256"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}