20. FACE

If you order The Story of How All Animals Are Equal & Other Tales now, you may be one of the first 50 to get a free broadside of a story featured in the collection. Click HERE to order now!

One of the collection’s 22 stories is titled ‘face’. It’s an attempt to concretize the slippery but all-consuming phenomenon of Facebook, and it does so by starting with the following Stéphane Mallarmé quote:

All earthly existence must ultimately be contained in a book.

The story unfolds around a triangle modeled after the one that is central in the Jean Rhys story, ‘The Lotus’. The triangle consists of

… [A] retired stewardess and a young straight couple who suffer a bit from a case of the hipsters. The couple consists of Poney Marie, a Portlander fresh out of public policy school, and Remy, a young man from a wealthy background who helped develop the book. The retired stewardess, Myrne, is singled out as a political candidate for Poney Marie to mentor and possibly install as a puppet dictator in the newly opened district of the book.

The book refers to that materialized version of Facebook I mentioned. The above excerpt is from a series of blog posts I wrote about ‘face’ when I was deep in the midst of writing it. Not only did I bring in Jean Rhys, I also managed to reference Danielle Steel, Roberto Calasso, and Caitlin Horrocks. To learn more about how ‘The Lotus’ influenced my writing process, you can read those posts here.

And click HERE to order The Story of How All Animals Are Equal & Other Tales, where you can read the full text of ‘face’!