Examples of the genre
editLiterature
editExamples of building stories in literature are Thomas M. Disch's 334 (1972), Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City (1978), Georges Perec's Life a User's Manual (1978), Geoff Ryman's 253 (1998), John Lanchester's Capital (2012), Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140 (2017) and Chris Ware's graphic novel Building Stories (2012).
Film
editIn film the form had been used in Chungking Express (1994), and also as a way to bring together collaborations of multiple directors, for example by David Lynch in Hotel Room (1993) and Quentin Tarantino in Four Rooms (1995).
Television
editThe television shows 227 (1985-1990) and Married People (1990-1991) are ensemble casts brought together by joint occupation of a building. The Love Boat (1977-1986), while having a core cast of the ship's captain and crew, used the ship and its various cruises to bring together guest actors to portray passengers for plot-lines of a few episodes each in duration.
Nonfiction
editA building is sometimes used as an organizing device in non-fiction as well, usually as a means to compose a joint biography. Some examples of non-fiction apartment stories are:
- Sherill Tippins's February House (2005), a joint biography of W. H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee, written around their joint residence at 7 Middagh Street in Brooklyn during the years 1940 and 1941.
- Sound Portraits's radio documentary on the Sunshine Hotel, a flophouse in New York's Bowery neighborhood.[1]
- Charles King's Midnight at the Pera Palace: The Birth of Modern Istanbul (2014), using the Pera Palace Hotel and its guests as a microcosm of the transformation of the Ottoman Empire into Turkey.
References
editBibliography
edit- Hamon, Philippe (1993). Expositions: Literature and Architecture in Nineteenth-Century France. trans. Katia Sainson-Frank and Lisa Maguire. Oakland, Calif.: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-52-007325-8.
- Isay, David; Abramson, Stacy (18 September 1998). "The Sunshine Hotel". 99% Invisible (Podcast). Sound Portraits. Retrieved 21 April 2017.
- Marcus, Sharon (1999). Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-20852-8.
- Molinsky, Eric (5 April 2017). "New York 2140". Imaginary Worlds (Podcast). No. 63. Panoply. Retrieved 21 April 2017.
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