free to read, freely written

Robert Olen Butler gets down and dirty in all the voices in the latest Narrative magazine. In his piece, "Little Fuckers" he recasts some improbable and actual sexual encounters between historical figures in a stream of consciousness riff which occasionally does violence to the style of the originals.
I liked the Oscar Wilde with Walt, hehe, shades of D.H. Lawrence (though if you do not include full stops it is hardly Oscar at all, more like a fingerprint lifted from his half-empty champagne glass), I liked Aimee McPherson, I DID NOT like him channelling Peter Carey's Ned Kelly in the middle of Clyde Barrow though:

Here is my honest declaration to you, Miss Parker, I am a dangerous man to anybody who gets in the way of me taking what I want and pissing on the shoes of the government that has took everything the working stiffs have got, which also means that nobody messes with any woman who is with me.

Ahem. A subscription to Narrative, where you can read stories by Joyce Carol Oates and Tobias Wolff from time to time, is free.