Lying and Making a Living

Fiction with Footnotes

By: William Dunlap

Narrated by: Eric Altheide

Lying and Making a Living - the title from a Barry Hannah quote - picks up where Short Mean Fiction leaves off. It contains more of the irreverent, hard-hitting, exhilarating, ironic, and emblematic prose we’ve come to expect from the writer and painter William Dunlap. His stories, some as short as a single page, leave the listener gasping for breath and wanting more. Short Mean Fiction, his first gathering of stories, promised words and pictures, whereas Lying and Making a Living delivers fiction with footnotes in all their subtle explanation and incongruity. Language is something of a birthright for this Southerner whose characters we know by what they do. Dunlap identifies with William Faulkner, who said he invented his people and then “ran along behind them, writing down what they have to say”. As with Dunlap's paintings, he feels little pride in authorship and makes no literary claims for Lying and Making a Living, but he admits that for what it's worth, for better or worse, and to his utter surprise, there are many more where these came from.

©2021 William Dunlap (P)2021 William Dunlap