On Not Noticing
Description is, in fact, more useful for what it says about the noticer than the noticed.
Edgar Degas
Fiction Responding to Fiction: Jamaica Kincaid and John Keene (and Edgar Degas)
Jamaica Kincaid’s classic story “Girl,” first published in the New Yorker in 1978, is a small gem, consisting of less than 700 perfectly chosen words. We can see the echoes of Kincaid in John Keene’s story “Acrobatique” even though the story was not written intentionally to respond.