Looking Through Times Gone By

In Marcel Proust's A La Recherche du Temps Perdu (In Search of Lost Time), arguably the greatest literary accomplishment in the history of literary accomplishments, the author explores, by expanding and magnifying, the art of revisiting recollected memories and reconstructing them to analyze, challenge, or reconnect with the past.

In addition to weaving into his mammoth work a wide variety of both philosophical exploration and social commentary on topics like homosexuality, antisemitism, possessive love, and sociolinguistics, Proust famously pushes the limits of sentence length, his philosophical thoughts and narratives often dipping, veering, or taking off on side ventures while still serving the same theme, never seeming to end, for multiple pages, before they arrive at the next period, but there is so much packed into them that you know you must have missed something, so you feel like you should go back and read them again and again.

Inspired by Proust's penchant for marathon sentences, this collection proposes a new, literary art form: the one-sentence short story. Like Proust, whose masterpiece has no conventional story line, no beginning, and no end, and whose structure defied the traditional chapters that long novels, I have cobbled together this collection of memorable events or themes that have woven their way through my life, interlacing social commentary and philosophical wanderings along the way.

An homage to the greatest literary work ever produced, this book will present each distinct memory or event as its own chapter, each taking the form of a one-sentence short story.

Enjoy!