I'm happy to have new fiction in The Capra Review, and I love the art selected for the piece, The Unicorn Rests in a Garden, which is tangentially part of the story. (Just for fun, I chose a different unicorn piece for this blog post.) Other art mentioned in the story include Greco-Roman sculpture, Piet Mondrian's abstractions, and Martha Graham's choreography.
In a way, "The Samoyed" is a companion piece to my story "Old Boyfriends," which appeared in Propeller Magazine in December 2013. Both stories started out as structural "imitations" of Chekhov stories, "Old Boyfriends" using "Gusev" as a starting point and "The Samoyed" using "The Lady with the Dog," though I use the term imitation loosely. I wrote about that exercise here on my blog as well as for Ploughshares here. Anyway, here's how "The Samoyed" begins:
“Modern art is fine for decor,” he said, popping a vodka-soaked olive into his mouth. “But I don’t find it meaningful.” His lips were full, his eyes a gelid blue, his jaw-line well-defined with a stubble that seemed to Jane too calculated.