Most Famous Short Film of All Time

Announcing something big. I just told you what it is.

3 min readJul 19, 2022

I’ve written a novel. An enterprising small press called tRaum, based in Munich, is going to publish it. The glowy-pink cover art is by Cel La Flaca. Here it is. I am sharing it for the first time: title, publisher, cover.

The book cover of MOST FAMOUS SHORT FILM OF ALL TIME. Stanley drives a pink convertible. Aparna is in the back seat, gesturing to Lev, who runs outside the car, trying to keep up. In the background is a 1950s-style cinema. One side of the marquee says MOST FAMOUS SHORT FILM OF ALL TIME and the other side says BY TUCKER LIEBERMAN.

Will We Ever Catch Up?

This guy, Lev—that’s him running behind the car on the book cover—unspools an endlessly evolving thought about time, the universe, his job, his friendships, every book he’s ever read, and why someone might want to kill him. Those are his friends, Aparna and Stanley, in the car.

Mostly a Novel is Made of Words

With this one, there’s visual formatting, too.

Several lines of the novel, showing the visual formatting. A single black-and-white frame of the Zapruder film of the JFK assassination, #8, with the colors inverted like a photo negative. Flashbulb August 1987. “ELVIS HAS BEEN DEAD FOR A WHILE.” Let me explain how I feel about paperclips. But first let me tell you how I know Elvis is dead. On the tenth anniversary of his death, the supermarket tabloids claimed he was riding in flying saucers, visiting the President, and so…

This is Entirely Real

I can do this for hundreds of pages. Why I would do it is indeed a question. I have been doing it for years, and finally it is done.

Several lines of the novel, showing the visual formatting. A single black-and-white frame of the Zapruder film of the JFK assassination, #411, with the colors inverted like a photo negative. Flashbulb Aug 2016. “ONE LAST QUESTION.” The radio DJ plays “Suddenly Last Summer” by the Motels more than once. Maël Renouard’s new book speaks of “a new art language” made of “complex sequences drawn from previous works.”

Reality Perception

In Most Famous Short Film of All Time, every brief passage is labeled either Flyleaf, Flashbulb, or Fog. That isn’t exactly a story structure. It’s more about reality perception.

“Flyleaf” is Lev’s philosophizing. His questions and hypotheses are about him. He speaks in his own voice, though I might often agree with him. He might describe our real world and give us philosophical tools we can use. His world might overlap with ours, and he might transmit information across a boundary. That would be trans.

“Flashbulb” is Lev’s day-to-day story of his baseline reality. It’s nonfiction to him, fiction to us…