curiosity cabinet

"Gone were the days when he would give absurd accounts of his worldwide travels or when he would indulge his fondness for irony and sarcasm and deploy all his theatrical talents in merciless accounts of his family, whose contempt had hardened into hatred and whom he described as a curiosity cabinet containing a collection of Catholic-Jewish-Nazi specimens. Nothing he now had to offer had the whiff of the big wide world, as they say; there was only the odor of wretchedness and death. His clothes, though as elegant as ever, no longer made the same debonair impression or aroused the same unfailing admiration: they seemed shabby and threadbare, like anything he still ventured to say."

~~ from Wittgenstein's Nephew by Thomas Bernhard

Novel Excerpts

Spark Park

"Uncle Sam's Decline": An Excerpt from Spark Park, The Airgonaut, September 2022

"Persecuting the Poet": An Excerpt from Spark Park, Malarkey Books, June 2021

"Night Shift": An Excerpt from Spark Park, Revolution John, April 2021

Auggie's Revenge

from Part I, Chapter 3: "Be Patient, Rover" at American, British and Canadian Studies

Part I, Chapters 1-3: Auggie's Revenge Sample at Beating Windward Press

Part I, Chapter 9: "Uncle Sam's Blood Money" at When Falls the Coliseum

Fight for Your Long Day

Chapter 3: "Away from Therapy and then South and West" at Atticus Books 

Short Stories by Alex Kudera

"Chinese Sun," Meniscus, Volume 12, Issue 2, pages 139 to 146, November 2024

"Going to Hell," Soyos Books, November 11, 2023

"An Amazing Turn," New Oxford Review, January-February 2023

"On the Plane," in Zeitgeist: Stories Capturing Different Eras in the Vast Expanse of Time, December 2022

"Early Morning Train," Humans of the World, June 2022

"An Old Friend Called," Lighthouse Weekly, March 2022

"A Thanksgiving," Eclectica Magazine, July 2021

"Bombing From Above," Heavy Feather Review, June 2020

"Over Fifty Billion Kafkas Served," Eclectica Magazine, October 2019 "Awash in Barach and Bolano," The Agonist, July 2019

"About Your Status," Monkeybicycle, June 2019 "Free Car," Heavy Feather Review, September 2018 "My Father's Great Recession," Heavy Feather Review, March 2018

"Frade Killed Ellen," Dutch Kills Press, July 2015

"Turquoise Truck," Mendicant Bookworks, September 2015

"The Betrayal of Times of Peace and Prosperity," Gone Dog Press, February 2011

honest teacher

"An honest teacher would bring about the extinction of the entire teaching profession. An honest teacher would obliterate every illusion, practice, and malpractice that keeps this edifice of teaching in place, I thought."

~~ from The Sick List by Ansgar Allen

The Sick List

"Universities were everywhere setting up psychiatric wards, I discovered. It became an accepted feature of university life, these wards, and the necessity of setting them up. My own institution was particularly proud of its own. Not only was it the first to set up such a ward, it could also boast the most impressive ratio between diminished employees and beds. My university maintained the longest standing and most comprehensive provision of beds for the lowest proportion of incarcerated employees. That index, a ratio of one thing to another, was a source of considerable pride. We had more beds than we needed, and so were always ready, whereas other institutions often had more immobile and dessicated employees than beds."

~~ from The Sick List by Ansgar Allen

my least unsuccessful

"I'm not going to write it just for my own satisfaction, after all, and then leave it lying around when it's finished. Naturally I intend to publish it, whatever the consequences. For I actually believe that this work will be my most successful, or rather my least unsuccessful. I certainly am thinking of publishing it! But before I can publish it I have to write it, I thought, and at this thought I burst into a fit of laughter, of what I call self-laughter, to which I have become prone over the years through being constantly alone. Yes, you've first got to write the work in order to be able to publish it! I exclaimed to my own amusement."

~~ from Concrete by Thomas Bernhard

the weight of their luggage

"People always make the mistake of taking too many clothes on a journey, half killing themselves with the weight of their luggage, and then, if they have any sense, always wearing the same things when they get there, Now I've been travelling on my own account for over thirty years, I told myself, yet I still always take too much at the last moment. But on this journey, which will possibly—indeed almost certainly—be my last, I thought, I won't take too much. That at least was my intention."

~~ from Concrete by Thomas Bernhard

a certain defect of character

"To publish anything is folly and evidence of a certain defect of character. To publish the intellect is the most heinous of all crimes, and on a number of occasions I have not recoiled from committing this most heinous of crimes. It wasn't even done out of a crude urge to communicate, because I've never wanted to communicate my ideas to anybody. That has never attracted me. It was a craving for fame pure and simple."

~~ from Concrete by Thomas Bernhard

This is America

"I'm at my driver's side door next to the chain-linked fence when I see something dark and shiny slither out at an angle from beneath the engine. Surprised, I drop my car keys, bang my head against the driver-side mirror as I rise too fast after retrieving them off the cracked cement. Fuck. I stomp my feet to shoe the garden snake away, although it's already lost in the crab grass grown over an abandoned overflow lot behind the dealership. No ancient idiotic symbolism is going to ruin the drive home after I made my monthly nut. No, sir, it won't. So seated behind the wheel, I crank the engine. As I pull out of my spot, I hit the stereo and turn up a country station I can't escape. This is America, not the apocalypse, and Thanksgiving weekend has been good to me."

~~ from "A Thanksgiving," by Alex Kudera

     Eclectica Magazine, July / August 2021

diamond ring

"At this point, I'm wide awake, even alert, and I begin to see myself past midnight and standing at a rope for discount jewelry. I turn to my left. I can see all the way down the aisle to the toy section. It's a mob scene. Crowds rummage through blue and pink plastic. Shelves in disarray. Grasping, pushing, shoving. An occasional moment of kindness. Our turn arrives. I stumble forward, almost fall, when a store employee releases the yellow cord. I have to recover quickly as everyone around me is already on the move. But I suppose there is a God because it seems my item—the diamond ring—is not the most desired one. It must be too expensive for the midnight Wal-Mart shopper. There are only three of us, and there are four rings. Just like that, I have one. But now I have to escape from the store."

~~ from "A Thanksgiving," by Alex Kudera

     Eclectica Magazine, July / August 2021

American holiday

"My client shut the grill cover and led us off the porch. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 1,300 points over the next three days. Within two months, my new-home inquiries dropped to zilch. You could say that's the life of a commission-based independent contractor, or you could say we were screwed. Two different clients took me to court to undo their deal and get their money back. That's when our slow demise became a race to the bottom. It was hard to adjust to our family's 'new normal,' so we spent as much in our first six months of living off savings and home equity as we did the next year. Eighteen months after falling through the floor, we'd gathered our wits enough to squint through the darkness and climb out of the mess we'd made."

~~ from "A Thanksgiving," by Alex Kudera

     Eclectica Magazine, July / August 2021

Nitzsche from Philadelphia

"Though George E. Nitzsche of Philadelphia did not express Bachmuller's sense of debased surroundings, his letter [to Nietzsche's sister] similarly shows a self longing for exaltation and connection. It was quite literally, Nietzsche to whom he sought to cleave himself: 'My name, as you will see from the above letterhead, is one of the few Nitzsches in America--probably the only one. Unfortunately, my grandparents, in a legal document, left out the "e," and the error was perpetuated. However, I am proud of the name, and that probably my ancestors came from the same stock as you and your illustrious brother.' In an effort to sketch out the possible trunk of their mutual family tree, Nitzsche went on to tell the woman he hoped was a not-so-distant cousin about the Moravian and Bohemian roots of their people, and how his branch of the Ni[e]tzsche family immigrated to Pennsylvania in 1739."

~~ from American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas 

        by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

a hobo's life

"I come to a period in which I was literally a wandering student, a steady occupant of libraries, leading actually a hobo's life, but with the outward leisure of gentleman and scholar. I supported myself by small jobs of free-lancing or other efforts of the brain, and what I lived on is all but incredible. I met many people, but I made few ties. I may seem to have been derelict, but such was not the case, not so much as when I was working up to be a buyer for Boshnack's. I was waiting and watching constantly for some opening, that I might become a part of American intellectual life. When I got tired of one library, I packed my brief case and took up the hitchhiker's station along the road."

~~ from East Goes West by Younghill Kang

The "Ohio Country"

"Helene Bachmüller of Dayton, Ohio, wrote to let Förster-Nietzsche know that her brother had inspired the belief that human greatness was still possible in the modern world. Though unworthy of his greatness, he nevertheless awakened in her a longing for something deeper in herself. Nietzsche, Bachmüller confessed, had saved her from her 'own inner emptiness.' The 'Ohio country' she called home had become 'tame and commonplace,' filled with lives 'trivial and . . . essentially ugly, for they are engrossed with matters of money and motors, not work or faith or art.' Though disgusted by the offensive mediocrity around her, she was also chagrined by her own limitations: 'It would be, probably, impossible for you to imagine anything more superficial than I am.'"

~~ from American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas 

        by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

Running for the Bus

Running for the Bus: Life and Love in the time of COVID

by Thomas J. Hubschman

"My Apology" by Sam Lipsyte

"The events themselves—the words, the acts, the intent—are a blur, a frantic smear. A certain phrase, once quite common and, by my lights, benign, was uttered, I admit, by me. Its lesser-known and brutal associations, to which I was not privy at the time, choked the office like a poison gas.

"Currents of history pushed this gas, herded it, prevented it from dissipating or exiting through vents. My history seeped into that of the offended party, which collided with the history we’d all been taught in school, as well as the revision of that history we knowing people knew, as well as the revision of that revised history, which had recently gusted in with the force of a reckoning.

"Also, it should be noted with appropriate candor that after I uttered the aforementioned phrase and suffered an onslaught of verbal abuse from my co-workers—no doubt unmooring me from my usual sense of decorum—I did, in fact, in plain view of all, urinate on my offended colleague’s desk."

~~ from "My Apology" by Sam Lipsyte

Independence Day

I'll have new fiction about another American holiday published by the middle of July, but for now, enjoy "The Bicentennial with Grandpa Andy," a memoir excerpt that may yet become part of a published book.

conversation was the firebrand

"Senzar was an Indo-Oxford product, and was now in America studying engineering. Of course, he was a fanatic patriot, but his words were very much in the clouds, you could not make out whether he intended to go back to India or not. So long as he kept silent, Senzar looked handsome, poetic and sad. And at first he kept silent, rolling around the splendid melancholy of his great dark eyes, so silent that everybody was sympathetic, thinking him shy. But with Senzar it was not shyness. His idea of conversation was the firebrand, elemental attack, mortal combat. On any subject he was ready to die. He was just looking around for an opponent. I do not know if English domination has made Hindus that way—I suppose so—for most of them are ready to go off at a moment's notice. Anyhow, Hindus and Far-Easterners did not get along well together in Boston schools. It is thought by some Orientals that Hindus lack humor and proportion. What Hindus think of other Orientals, I do not know. But Senzar soon fastened on me as his opponent. Suddenly he began questioning me about my college."

~~ from East Goes West by Younghill Kang

The Buyer

"To be a buyer is the dream of every clerk in every department store in America. And I was in almost the biggest one of all. Boshnack's sold the littlest thing as well as the biggest. There were buyers for needles, for rugs, for books, for china, for airplanes. Each buyer was given so many inches of space in the big store. This was his kingdom. Just like a small proprietor, he paid for all that went into his space, and kept track through his clerks of all that went out . . . except that he made no profits. In his department he was looked up to almost as much as Mr. Boshnack himself. When he passed, the underlings said in a hushed voice, "The Buyer!"

~~ from East Goes West by Younghill Kang