Trying to Be : A Collection

The stories in John Haskell's Trying to Be wrestle in exhilarating ways with the relationships between fiction and other arts- painting, film, dance- in a manner that feels natural and seamless.Painter, narrator, spectator, reader, writer- it doesn't matter which.What matters is how they speak and think and create in relation to each other, always shifting, always refashioning themselves.Haskell's narrators are porous- to these other art forms, to the past, to other people and characters.It is perhaps this permeability that forms them, and part of what forms the stories themselves.