Vance Aandahl 8 min read

One ordinary morning, more than a million ordinary men each wake up certain they are Marlon Brando.

Vance Aandahl's 1962 curio catalogues the sudden transformation of good old Chet from Accounting, good old Barth on the duck hunt, and a million and a half others, each abruptly gazing out through 'lizard-cold Marlon Brando eyes' and walking out on their old lives. A short, strange, deadpan riff on conformity, celebrity, and the thin membrane of the suburban self. Read it for New Wave-adjacent absurdism that's funnier and eerier than its one-line premise suggests.

In its time

Published in 1962, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

8 min read (a short story, a single idea, delivered and gone).