Week Ten: Twenty-First Century Literature

Todd James Pierce

This week we will be considering three short stories. We will be reading two stories before class, one by Pierce called Colombine: The Musical and one chosen by Pierce to be read by our class called The Beauty Treatment by Stacey Richter from her collection My Date With Satan. In class we will read and discuss together another story by Pierce called Newsworld.  Copies of these stories are currently available on the course resource page.

Todd James Pierce is a novelist and short story writer known especially for his 2006 collection, Newsworld. He is a graduate of the MFA program and the University of California at Irvine and the Ph.D. program at Florida State University. He creative writing at California Polytechnic State University. He is currently working on a lengthy work of non-fiction recounting the history of the men and women who built the new generation of American theme parks in the 1950s. We will discuss some of this work in the second half of our class. Pierce will be talking about this history as well as showing rare footage of animators and park designers from this period in his on-campus talk Wednesday evening in the Academic Center Auditorium.

Next week the featured work is the novel You by the novelist and game designer Austin Grossman. The novel unfolds in a retrospective history of electronic gaming.