Brian Kiteley Selected Works

Writers have long turned to exercises for help with beginning—be it a new piece of fiction, a daily routine, or a serious writing life. Behind the theory of exercises is an attitude of curiosity and expectancy, a desire to ask questions of yourself and of the world, to boldly—or not so boldly—stick a toe into the waters of something fresh, provocative, and exhilarating. To create fiction on the verge. In The 4 A.M. Breakthrough, companion to The 3 A.M. Epiphany, award-winning author and professor Brian Kiteley presents you with another 200 stimulating exercises, designed to help you expand your understanding of the problems and processes of more complex, satisfying fiction and to challenge you to produce works of which you never thought yourself capable.

Originally published in 1989 by Ticknor & Fields, Brian Kiteley’s Still Life with Insects is the intensely focused chronicle of Elwyn Farmer, an amateur entomologist, who uses the field notes of his insect sightings to examine and reweave the tattered fragments of his life. In a series of visually powerful and emotionally breathtaking vignettes Kiteley distills the transient beauty of the natural world and lays bare the suffering and joy of one man’s life from his maturity in the post-war years to very old age in the 1980’s. His striking narrative technique aptly captures the experience we all have as we struggle to make sense of what it means to be human in the face of the inevitable passage of time.

The River Gods is a novel in fragments, a mix of fact and fiction, in which various inhabitants of the area around what is now Northampton, Massachusetts, from the eleventh century through the 1990s, speak of their lives and of the community, a place haunted by the pervasive melancholy of extinguished desire. Each of the voices—including a character named Brian Kiteley and his family, the original Native American inhabitants, the actor Richard Burton, Sojourner Truth, Richard Nixon, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jonathan Edwards, and many nameless others—ruminate on a past that is startlingly present and tangible. The main character, though, is the world of Northampton, irrevocably woven into the fabric of Western history, yet still grounded by the everyday concerns of health, money, food, love, and family. It is a novel of voices, the living and the dead, that illuminate the passage of time.

While exploring Cairo, Ib, an American, is taken up with by Armenian Gamal-Leon, who follows him by way of a practical joke during the Muslim Ramadan fast period. Humorous cultural misunderstandings ensue.