Writing Workshops

Everything Authentic Is Simultaneous: Time and Memory in Crime Fiction with William Boyle (Sold Out)

$395

6 Sessions

Out of stock

Once a week Wednesdays, 6:30 pm EDT - 8:30 pm EDT April 26 to May 31, 2023

Online via Zoom

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This workshop has reached its capacity. To join the waitlist, please email Randy Winston at [email protected].

This course will consider how time and memory function in crime fiction. We’ll seek to understand the balance between action and interiority, between pastness and presentness. Beyond that, we’ll consider compressed time frames versus stories spanning many years. In my own fiction, I’ve been more obsessed and concerned with time than ever, and I’ll seek to illuminate my own discoveries. All of this will be in the service of writing effective character- and place-driven crime fiction.

Course Outline

We’ll consider examples from writers like Mariana Enriquez, Yuri Herrera, and Friedrich Dürrenmatt, and more.

Sessions I–VI: Lecture, Reading/Discussion, Students Workshop, Q&A

Capacity: 12

Led by

William Boyle

William Boyle

William Boyle is the author of five novels: Gravesend, which was nominated for the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière in France and shortlisted for the John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger in the UK; The Lonely Witness, which was nominated for the Hammett Prize and the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière; A Friend Is a Gift You Give Yourself, winner of the Prix Transfuge du meilleur polar étranger in France; City of Margins, a Washington Post Best Thriller and Mystery Book of 2020; and, most recently, Shoot the Moonlight Out, listed by CrimeReads as one of the ten best noir novels of 2021. He has also published a story collection, Death Don’t Have No Mercy, and a novella, Everything Is Broken (published initially in France and subsequently serialized in Southwest Review).

By William Boyle

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City of Margins

By William Boyle

Published by Pegasus Books

PURCHASE

In City of Margins, the lives of several lost souls intersect in Southern Brooklyn in the early 1990s. There’s Donnie Parascandolo, a disgraced ex-cop with blood on his hands; Ava Bifulco, a widow whose daily work grind is her whole life; Nick, Ava’s son, a grubby high school teacher who dreams of a shortcut to success; Mikey Baldini, a college dropout who’s returned to the old neighborhood, purposeless and drifting; Donna Rotante, Donnie’s ex-wife, still reeling from the suicide of their teenage son; Mikey’s mother, Rosemarie, also a widow, who hopes Mikey won’t fall into the trap of strong arm work; and Antonina Divino, a high school girl with designs on breaking free from Brooklyn. Uniting them are the dead: Mikey’s old man, killed over a gambling debt, and Donnie and Donna’s poor son, Gabe.

These characters cross paths in unexpected ways, guided by coincidence and the pull of blood. There are new things to be found in the rubble of their lives, too. The promise of something different beyond the barriers that have been set out for them. This is a story of revenge and retribution, of facing down the ghosts of the past, of untold desires, of yearning and forgiveness and synchronicity, of the great distance of lives lived in dangerous proximity to each other. City of Margins is a Technicolor noir melodrama pieced together in broken glass.

About this series

Writing Workshops

We strive to make our classes the most inviting and rewarding available, offering an intimate environment to study with award-winning, world-class writers. Each class is specially designed by the instructor, so whether you’re a fledgling writer or an MFA graduate polishing your novel, you’ll find a perfect fit here.

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