The great film director John Hughes once moonlighted as a flash fiction author.
In a Vanity Fair article, it was revealed that the director published micro-stories in the Broken Wrist Project–a literary journal edited by his son, James Hughes. The director wrote under the pseudonym, JL Hudson and his first submissions were published in the second issue of the journal. We uncovered copies of that journal for sale at Gallery Nucleus. The journal is pictured above, and sells for $14.96.
Here’s more about the project, from the first issue: “[it is] a hybrid format that blurs the line between street-level art books and literary journals. The cornerstone of the series is the comprehensive resurrection of the illustrated short story, an artform that is sadly and quietly dying within the pages of America’s periodicals and journals.”
The Vanity Fair web exclusive contains a number of his brief fictions, and it makes for some fascinating reading. After the jump, you can read a semi-NSFW excerpt from his flash fiction, excerpted in the Vanity Fair article.
Here’s a sample: Hudson’s story ‘The Tit Jar’ appeared in Broken Wrist Project’s second print collection, B.W.P. TWO. It’s a Salingeresque, child-narrated caper set in midcentury Grosse Pointe, Michigan, where Hughes himself had spent his early boyhood. (‘It was a jar. A jar filled with tits. Pictures of tits. From skin magazines. In a Miracle Whip jar buried in Miss Barnes’s vacant lot.’)”