Window Voyeurs

Author’s Comments

by Job

Why write Window Voyeurs?

There is enough New Yorker-style contemporary literary short fiction. Window Voyeurs is not that! These vignettes have events. Something happens. Something is discovered. Frequently there is an ironic reversal, joke, shock, or realization. Each story may have metaphors, symbols, or jokes. These are mini Where's Waldo? stories. They are fast to read but may take time to fully grasp. They are not just stories; they are literarily entertainment.

People love looking into other people's lives when they think they aren't supposed to. Window Voyeurs provides that view.

The titles that directly inspired Window Voyeurs include Erma Bombeck, Life is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits, James Joyce, Dubliners, David Sedaris, Calypso, and Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window.

Other related works include Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. It is a collection of individual short pieces accumulating into something larger than themselves. In Window Voyeurs, readers also gradually realize they're not just reading anecdotes; they're reading a portrait of people.

Raymond Carver's, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love — Window Voyeurs showcases ordinary behavior like Carver, but additionally delivers a punchline or ironic reveal.

J. D. Salinger's Nine Stories — Seemingly modest situations revealing considerably more about people than initially appears.

Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man Bradbury — Much like Bradbury, Window Voyeurs provides disparate stories with a conceptual device that makes the collection feel like a book, but with a completely different style than Bradbury.

Finally, Giovanni Boccaccio's The Decameron is surprisingly relevant to Window Voyeurs on several levels. Sex, stupidity, deception, cruelty, coincidence, humor, and people behaving badly. The Where's Waldo? in this comparison is Boccaccio's support of Dante and the Divine Comedy. Is it a coincidence that Job is also the author of The Gnostic Divine Comedy trilogy?