Kevin P. Keating: Fiction, Essays & Commentary

From the December 2006 edition of Smokebox :   Like most dreams this one begins in media res. I was incarcerated in an old industrial complex not unlike those abandoned, asbestos-filled warehouses that crowd the neglected streets and labyrinthine alleys of my hometown Cleveland. Around the crumbling ruin of this makeshift prison stretched an imposing gray wall topped with glimmering razor wire. Rumors circulated that the wall had a secret opening, a small hole just big enough for a man to squeeze through and make his way back home to friends and family. At certain times during the day prisoners were marched outside and permitted to stretch in a narrow concrete pen along the wall, but no one dared search for the opening in broad daylight. Somehow I knew, with the inexplicable logic of all dreams, that this “exercise yard” was frequently used for other, more diabolical things. When the guards informed us that it was time for our daily “exercise,” many of my fellow inmates would tu...

From the November 2006 edition of Fringe Magazine: During a trip to New York City several years ago, I had the pleasure of meeting F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. It happened this way. I was visiting my friends, Kevin and Kathlene, who like thousands of other ambitious twenty-somethings had moved to the city to seek out their fortune, and even though fortune was a little slow in arriving, had in fact been delayed indefinitely, they nevertheless assumed an air of sophistication and decadence. From a distance and in silhouette Kevin and Kathlene looked like those svelte, stiffly posed figures you see in Jazz Age advertisements, all sharp angles and long lines, a man and woman sipping martinis while standing at a penthouse window; a flapper in a sequined dress, a dandy in a tux, templates used by graphic artists who designed the programs for the latest Gershwin or Cole Porter musical. Girl Crazy, Oh, Kay!, Anything Goes. Whenever they were nearby I heard, or at any rate imagined I hea...

From the spring 2006 edition of Ascent Aspirations :  Paul Auster, now regarded as a major American writer by many critics, ordinarily concerns himself with large, abstract notions of fate, destiny, chance, coincidence and other quasi-mystical matters typically categorized as existential in nature. Auster is, after all, fluent in French and has translated the work of many obscure French poets into English. He may also be the closest thing we have in this country to a café society intellectual. Like some of the better known writers of post-war Paris, Auster examines the dark side of human nature; think of Sartre’s No Exit with its famous adage “Other people are hell” and Camus’ The Stranger with its bleak insight “A man who has lived only one day can easily live for a hundred years in prison. He will have enough memories to keep him from being bored.”  Read the entire review