Chopin, Schumann, Ravel, Berlioz, Sibelius, Prokofiev. Pink Martini, Tin Hat Trio. Miles Davis. Piazzolla, Gomez, Rusted Root. The Blow. Blonde. Cars. ABBA! The Mnemonic Devices. Rusty Spell. Lots of other stuff.
Movies
Foreign, Indie, Drama. Kids, Gummo, Little Miss Sunshine, Life is Beautiful, Somersault, Noise, Hard Candy, MatchPoint, Pleasantville, Mulholland Drive, Being John Malkovich, Memento, Talk to Her, Fargo, Capote, Amelie, Mystic River, In the Bedroom, We Don't Live Here Anymore, Rosenstrasse, Focus, Magnolia, Sorry Haters, Y Tu Mama Tambien, American Beauty, anything with Julianne Moore, John C. Reilly, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Mark Ruffalo, Tobey Macguire, William Macy. Anything by Harmony Korine.
Television
Law and Order. ER. House. Law and Order.
Books
Yasunari Kawabata, James Salter, Raymond Carver, Lydia Davis, Anton Chekhov, Italo Calvino, Mary Robison, Donald Barthelme, Frederick Barthelme, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, JD Salinger, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Richard Brautigan, Flannery O'Connor, Tim O'Brien, Richard Powers, Jean Thompson, Christine Schutt, Diane Williams, Amy Hempel. Pia Ehrhardt!
Heroes
Frederick Barthleme, Richard Powers, Jean Thompson, Diane Williams, Mary Robison. Mary Buenning! All of my wonderful friends.
About me: My collection of flash fiction, OH BABY, published by Ravenna Press is available here: http://www.atlasbooks.com/ravennapress/nr.htm.
A few blurbs: **************************************************************
MICHAEL KIMBALL: "One of the most thrilling things about reading Kim Chinquee’s beautifully tiny stories is the great leaps that she takes between sentences—making the reader leap with her into a world of brief glimpses and bits of dialogue that are full of narrative implications, a world of perfectly chosen details that render the
understated emotion of a character’s whole life." **************************************************************
JEAN THOMPSON: "Kim Chinquee has the dead-eye aim and the precision with language that makes her stories hit the mark again and again. They explore the jangling nervous system beneath the ordinary surface of the world, and all the irony, shock, sadness, and hope contained therein. Pitch-perfect writing broadcast on a very real, and wonderful frequency." **************************************************************
COOPER RENNER: "While the bricks with which Chinquee constructs her fictions--failed or failing relationships, childhood friendships, the intricacies of family life--are not uncommon, the architecture she creates with them is rare indeed: stories now full of light, now somber, now opening the reader's eyes to an utterly new space." **************************************************************
ROBERT ALEXANDER: Kim Chinquee’s little stories are like Giacometti’s sculptures: she has pared away all the excess until only the essence remains. If you’re like me, you’ll get to the end of this collection and immediately start reading it again. Months later I find these stories still resonating in my memory—a phrase here, an image there, a character in search of something else. Go ahead, take this book home with you. You won’t be disappointed.
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FREDERICK BARTHELME: A wonderful debut collection. Chinquee writes with such precision it stuns how much she gets into a small space. Oh Baby will break your heart in one hundred ways, justlike the 800 page gorilla you didn’t read last week.
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My story, "Formation," which appeared in NOON Magazine, won a Pushcart Prize, and appears in the 2007 anthology, The Pushcart Prize XXXI: Best of the Small Presses.You can find links to my most recent work at http://www.kimchinquee.blogspot.com.
I just finished reading Oh Baby last night...and I loved it. I am honored to have been in your class twice even if it was a while ago. Keep on writing :-)
Hey Kim~~ Thanks for the comment back and I am glad you got your card okay... I have a job!! can you believe it.. I will fill you in with a call or email.. love ya
And they arrived, and kept arriving, story after story, one better than the next. We were amazed and cheered at the riches at our door. Our first annual short story contest brought us stories from all points of the globe: all corners of the United States, as well as Italy, France, China, Spain and many more. One author was 16 years old, yet his writing certainly did not bespeak his young years. Other authors had years of achievement pinned like medals to their chests—published novels, awards and prizes, publishing histories that blushed with authority. That was not our criteria of judgment, however. There was only one criterion: literary quality.
Come read winning entries by Grace Delobel, Martha Clarkson, Phil Haddock, and Paul Bowers. Also, feature author interviews with Lynn Stegner; YA author, Kate Buckley; artist-photographer, Ed Rode; fiction, non-fiction, poetry, cigar reviews, book reviews and much more. It’s our best yet and still getting better.
In celebration of Bloomsday today, June 16th, check out “Potato I Have” at ELIMAE. It’s a derived text that tracks Joyce’s use of the potato - a talisman for Bloom - in Ulysses.
And, if you’re in the mood for more Joycean derivations, check out “Gate. Safe!” at Admit Two, which tracks the theme of safety and recurring gates imagery throughout Joyce's Ulysses The moment in the book that inspired me occurs in the eighth episode, Lestrygonians: “Gate. Safe!”
I spent all morning with your book, Kim. All the pieces work off one another so beautifully. I know I'll be reading it again, and again, over the years.
