Window Voyeurs

Author’s Comments

by Job

Why write Window Voyeurs?

There is enough New Yorker-style contemporary literary short fiction. Window Voyeurs is not that! These vignettes have events. Something happens. Something is discovered. Frequently there is an ironic reversal, joke, shock, or realization. Each story may have metaphors, symbols, or jokes. These are mini Where's Waldo? stories. They are fast to read but may take time to fully grasp. They are not just stories; they are literarily entertainment.

People love looking into other people's lives when they think they aren't supposed to. Window Voyeurs provides that view.

The titles that directly inspired Window Voyeurs include Erma Bombeck, Life is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits, James Joyce, Dubliners, David Sedaris, Calypso, and Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window.

I was thinking about Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window when I came up with the concept for Window Voyeurs. Hitchcock turns watching one's neighbors into both entertainment and danger. Window Voyeurs plays with the same uncertainty: seeing something through a window doesn't necessarily mean you understand what you have seen.

Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried also influenced the Window Voyeurs collection. O'Brien's short pieces accumulate into something larger than themselves. In Window Voyeurs, readers also gradually realize they're not just reading anecdotes; they're reading a portrait of people.

Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love shares Window Voyeurs' fascination with ordinary people and seemingly ordinary behavior. Like Carver, Window Voyeurs finds meaning in small interactions, gestures, conversations, and relationships. The difference is that Window Voyeurs frequently pushes those observations toward a punchline, ironic reversal, or unexpected reveal.

J. D. Salinger's Nine Stories offers another literary connection to Window Voyeurs. Salinger's seemingly modest situations often reveal considerably more about his characters than initially appears. Window Voyeurs employs a similar observational approach, using brief encounters and ordinary situations to expose unexpected aspects of human behavior.

Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man provides a structural rather than stylistic comparison. Bradbury brings disparate stories together through a recurring conceptual device, transforming individual narratives into a unified book. Window Voyeurs similarly uses windows, mirrors, windshields, and acts of observation as recurring devices that connect otherwise independent stories. The literary styles, however, are intentionally very different.

Finally, Giovanni Boccaccio's The Decameron is surprisingly relevant to Window Voyeurs on several levels. Both collections explore sex, stupidity, deception, cruelty, coincidence, humor, and, quite simply, people behaving badly. There is even a literary Where's Waldo? hidden in the comparison: Boccaccio was an admirer and early champion of Dante Alighieri and the Divine Comedy. Is it merely coincidence that Job is also the author of The Gnostic Divine Comedy trilogy?