Reveal Codes - Lee Ann Roripaugh

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Résumé :

Winner of the 2022 Moon City Short Fiction Award

Reveal Codes is a collection of short stories mapping the ways in which people, and other animals, read and misread, communicate and miscommunicate, mask and unmask, with and around one another. In the abandonware word processing program, WordPerfect, reveal codes is the command that reveals the coding behind the face of a document. The stories in this collection spiral around a (bio)semiology of the multiplicities of desire. In a series of pas de deux, or duets, the characters in these stories try to make themselves legible to family, friends, and lovers--revealing their messy patterns, their bare-faced vulnerabilities. These are stories that unfurl tentacles of longing made with language in an attempt to decode the illegibility of an incoherent and inchoate surrounding world.