William H. Johnson, Temptation of Christ (c. 1945)

Mark's Pages

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I write short pieces called "microfiction" or even "nanofiction" by the truly ambitious.

This focus on short-and-tight originates with TriadCity. Participants in virtual worlds move around a lot: you might visit hundreds of individual spaces during a single login. We can't bog you down scrolling through pages of description. Instead we offer a focused sketch, and we make it possible for you to enrich that experience as you choose by interacting with virtual objects in greater detail. Of course, in Microfiction Land you're not interacting in the same active way, but the narrative practices of compression are similar. Thus, these. I post daily in an online workbook. Many of the results have appeared in the Web's better literary magazines: here's the publication history.

These are collections of workbook pieces grouped by theme:

Here's a different thing. A traditional Modernist set-piece, satirizing the theatricality of right-wing politics and generally being silly: After the Holocaust, on Gilligan's Island.

Please especially check out TriadCity. I believe that textual virtual worlds are an important form of literature. They're particularly good at fulfilling the formal and thematic agendas of Postmodernism. Along with other scholarly fora, The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism agrees, siting TriadCity as its culminating example of literary Postmodernism. This is further explained here on the SmartMonsters website. There's also a good Wikipedia article on TriadCity.

Thanks!