Duets
We had collaborated on other projects, never on short stories. We find working together forces us to consider, then reconsider. This time we began by agreeing on six arbitrarily chosen elements: a diary, brothers, April, and so on. We each wrote a story in which these six elements played a significant role. From the resulting two stories we chose six new elements, three from each: specifically, I chose two elements from his story, one I selected from my own. And from these new stories, six new elements. And so on.
“Szanto, a Montrealer, has a great talent for seeing and expressing the subtleties of human emotional transactions, and is a very able craftsman: it’s been a while since I’ve read such consistently precise and fluid prose.” —Montreal Gazette
