Dreams
and Dull Realities
A Collection
of Stories
by John
Kearns
Dreams
and Dull Realities is a unified collection of twelve stories
playing variations on the theme of the collision between imagination
and reality.
Dreams
and Dull Realities uses a variety of techniques such as children’s
speech, interior monologue, poetic flights, parodies of sportscasters,
and local dialects to tell the stories of Philadelphians and New
Yorkers ranging in age from childhood to adolescence to adulthood
to old age. |
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The
stories are arranged according to these age groups, with roughly
three stories from each one. About half of the stories (5) are told
from the female point of view and about half (7) from the male.
Dreams
and Dull Realities was written over the course two decades
in Philadelphia, The Bronx, Staten Island, and Manhattan. “Flight”
won Second Prize for Fiction at the Trumbull Arts Festival in 1992
and was published in the festival journal. It was also chosen for
the short fiction series at the NYC club, the Living Room. “Dreams
and Dull Realities,” “Backstage,” “Athletics,”
and “A Tragic Story by Beatrice Mahon, O.P.” have all
been enjoyed by reading audiences on Capitol Hill and at venues
around Manhattan.
Buy Dreams and Dull Realities.
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The
World
A Novel
By John
Kearns
“Why didn’t they know? … He could see the
darkness of their souls, the void that drove them to huddle together
at all times … He saw the souls, too, of all the other swim
clubs that he had joined or visited over the years, clubs filled
with equal measures of hypocrisy, deceit, and meanness, each one
seeming to its members, as primitive societies did to theirs, to
be all that there is, the whole world.”
Saturated with
what he has learned of Classics and history, a 16-year-old boy reflects
upon the flow of recent events in his own history: his discovering
his Irish heritage, his loss of a job, his receiving an Artistic
vocation, his traumatic experiences of unrequited love. These events
become psychic cataclysms that destroy his traditional worldview
and force him to create a new one. They also teach him what it means
to become an Artist and a man.
Exploiting
imagery ranging from Greek mythology to video games and employing
conventional and experimental techniques, The World is
a passionate, multi-layered, poetic depiction of an artistic soul’s
maturation. Twenty years in the writing, The World is a
work that should be read again and again.
Purchase The World for yourself!
For more information
on John Kearns’s writing, visit KearnsCafe.com.
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