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new yorker FICTION 2017
***—Excellent
** —Above Average
* —Average
NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2017
new yorker FICTION 2017***—Excellent December 4, 2017, J. M. Coetzee, “The Dog”: A young woman who passes by the yard of a vicious guard dog each day confronts the owners about introducing her to the dog. Coetzee’s most recent novel is The Schooldays of Jesus.
NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2017
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New Yorker Fiction 2017***—Excellent **November 27, 2017, Will Mackin, “The Lost Troop,":The narrator unravels an episodic tale of American soldiers in Afghanistan, 2008, involving themselves in a series of very unwarlike events. Mackin’s collection, Bring Out the Dog, will come out in March 2018.
NEXT TIME: My Book World
new yorker Fiction 2017***—Excellent **November 20, 2017, David Gilbert, “The Sightseers”: Robert and Paulette, residents of a newish high rise overlooking Central Park, prepare for and attend a party given by another couple in their social circle. Gilbert’s most recent novel is & Sons.
NEXT TIME: Farewell to a Piano
New Yorker Fiction 2017***—Excellent **November 6, 2017, Anne Enright, “The Hotel”: A woman flies from Dublin to New York then to Milan and finally to a German-speaking nation she cannot identify. The author’s most recent book is The Green Road published in 2015.
NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2017
New Yorker Fiction 2017***—Excellent ***October 30, 2017, Joseph O’Neill, “The Sinking of the Houston”: A Manhattanite father of three teens sets out to retrieve his mugged son’s phone. ¶ This story which strikes one note at the beginning—FATHERHOOD—quickly veers and intersects a larger history. In his high-tech fashion—monitoring son’s mugger by way of a track-your-child app on his own phone—Dad looks to rectify this wrong. After weeks of surveillance, he sallies forth in what looks like will be a kill and in the elevator encounters an old-man neighbor who soon reveals that when he was a teen he’d survived the sinking of the Houston in his engagement with the Bay of Pigs invasion, in 1962. The reader never learns whether Dad locates the mugger, but this chance meeting with a former teen does seem to change the context of his mission. O’Neill’s collection, Good Trouble, comes out in June 2018. Photograph by John Clang NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2017
New Yorker Fiction 2017***—Excellent **October 23, 2017, Denis Johnson, “Strangler Bob”: In 1967, eighteen-year-old Dink lands in jail for car theft along with a cast of characters with names like B.D., Dundun, and Strangler Bob. Johnson’s posthumous collection, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, comes out in January 2018.
NEXT TIME: My Book World
New Yorker Fiction 2017***—Excellent **October 16, 2017, Tessa Hadley, “Funny Little Snake”: A nine-year-old girl in 1960s London goes to visit her father and young stepmother who at first does not want the child around. Hadley’s latest book is Bad Dreams and Other Stories.
NEXT TIME: My Book World
New Yorker Fiction 2017***—Excellent **October 9, 2017, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum , “Likes”: With the 2016 election and a twelve-year-old ballerina’s social media posts as background, a father attempts to cope with his daughter’s puzzling leap into adulthood. One of Bynum’s recent books is Ms. Hempel Chronicles.
NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2017
New Yorker Fiction 2017***—Excellent **October 2, 2017, Ben Marcus, “Blueprints for St. Louis”: Roy and Ida, architects designing a memorial for victims of a mass bombing, differ on how to achieve their goal—just as they differ on how to live as a married couple. Marcus’s most recent collection is New American Stories.
NEXT TIME: My Book World
New Yorker Fiction 2017***—Excellent **September 25, 2017, Jonas Hassen Khemiri, “As You Should Have Told It to Me (Sort Of) If We Had Known Each Other Before You Died”: When police storm the door of a man, he, as narrator, assumes that his friends have designed an elaborate practical joke in lieu of bachelor party. Khemiri’s latest book is Everything I Don’t Remember.
NEXT TIME: My Book World
New Yorker Fiction 2017***—Excellent **September 18, Edwidge Danticat, “Sunrise, Sunset”: A Miami Haitian family must accept that their aging mother is suffering from dementia and her daughter from postpartum depression. The author’s most recent book is The Art of Death.
Illustration by Bianca Bagnarelli NEXT TIME: My Book World
New Yorker Fiction 2017***—Excellent **September 4, 2017, Miranda July, “The Metal Bowl”: A young woman makes a single but popular pornographic video, a momentous event that continues to influence her life seventeen years later. July's most recent novel is The First Bad Man.
NEXT TIME: My Book World New Yorker Fiction 2017 ***—Excellent ***August 28, 2017, Lauren Groff, “Dogs Go Wolf”: Two unnamed girls, ages four and seven, are abandoned at a fish camp on a Florida island and must fend for themselves. ¶ This story unfolds as any living nightmare might, with the consciousness of the two girls running wild like the story’s dog which keeps returning to camp then running into the woods: revealing their squalid nomadic past, the unnurturing nature of their mother and all her friends, the everyday search for food when sources run out, boiling stagnant pond water to stay hydrated until they run out of charcoal and must gather wood. The abuse of abandonment multiples tenfold each hour they are without loving, adult care. When other people arrive on the island—after what must be weeks—the girls don their mother’s shifts and apply lipstick to greet them. The older girl “put the lipstick back into her pocket. She would keep the gold cartridge of it long after the makeup inside was gone and only a sweet waxy smell of her mother remained” (74) Haunting, yes, haunting that a child would still think fondly of a parent after being treated so harshly, but that’s exactly what many of us do, find it in our hearts to forgive. Groff’s most recent novel is Fates and Furies.
Photograph by Rose Cromwell NEXT TIME: My Book World
New Yorker Fiction 2017***—Excellent ***August 21, 2017, Garth Greenwell, “An Evening Out”: A man celebrates the end of his seven-year teaching career in Bulgaria through a drunken night out in Sofia with two former students, both male. ¶ Perhaps the nameless narrator (except for Gospodinut, male teacher), Z., and N. are emblematic of the shame the story engenders when, in an unseemly display, he gropes and ogles one of the men on the dance floor of a noisy night club. Perhaps the excessive clamor, the excessive liquor, the excessive jubilance numb Gospodinut’s shame, but in the soberness of morning he is positive it will overwhelm him. Yet as he staggers toward his campus apartment, Mama Dog, a mascot, approaches him and becomes symbolic of a subtle change about to take place in Gospodinut’s life. This story achieves what most writers of gay stories would kill to achieve: both a specificity and universality that arrive in harmony on the page. Greenwell’s first novel, What Belongs to You, came out in 2016. Photograph by Wolfgang Tillmans c/o David Zwirner Gallery NEXT TIME: My Book World
New Yorker Fiction 2017***—Excellent ***August 7 and 14, 2017, Don DeLillo, “The Itch”: Robert T. Waldron, forty-four, possesses a body that itches symmetrically (both thighs) and when he takes his shirt off. ¶ Of course, his problem is more complex than that. Robert has itched with his former wife and now with Ana, a new lover. He sees three different seemingly eccentric dermatologists, each prescribing different yet ineffective remedies. One even asserts that the itch will always be with him. Just a gut feeling, but I believe Robert’s itch is a metaphor for his desires. What desires? Any and all of them. All persons itch for something or someone their entire lives. Though this story is not entirely appealing it is one I do admire, carried off with great aplomb by a skilled fiction technician. DeLillo’s latest novel Zero K, came out in 2016. Illustration by Richard McGuire. NEXT TIME: My Book World
New Yorker Fiction 2017***—Excellent **July 31, 2017, Kirstin Valdez Quade, “Christina the Astonishing (1150-1224)”: In this first-person account of a true story the eldest sister of three recalls the narrative of her troubled sister, Christina. Quade’s collection, Night of the Fiestas, came out in 2016.
NEXT TIME: My Book World
New Yorker Fiction 2017***—Excellent ***July 24, 2017, Cristina Henriquez, “Everything Is Far from Here”: A woman crossing over the border from Mexico into Texas is separated from her five-year-old son by the coyotes responsible. ¶ Fiction or not, this account is the most realistic, it would seem, that I have ever read: mothers waiting for children in the American detention center and not always being reunited, sickening food and water, other disenfranchised who are even more callous than the attendants, more abuse: “To throw up is to disobey orders” (54). Hope, like new skin, regenerates itself each day, yet it can be dashed abruptly: “And then one day there are leaves on the trees, and wild magnolia blossoms on the branches, bobbing gently in the breeze. She will stay in this place, she tells herself, until he comes. Through the window in the dayroom, she watches the white petals tremble, and, in a gust, a single blossom is torn off a branch. The petals blow apart, swirling, and drift to the ground” (55) Every American should have to spend a day in the protagonist’s shoes if for no other reason than to see what some must undergo to seek the privileges others more than likely take for granted. “It’s easy to let that happen, so much easier to give in, to be who they want you to be: a thing that flares apart in the tumult, a thing that surrenders to the wind” (55). A sad truth. The author’s latest novel, The Book of the Unknown Americans, came out in 2014.
Jon Lowenstein, photographer. NEXT TIME: My Book World
New Yorker Fiction 2017***—Excellent **July 10 and 17, 2017, Hye-young Pyun, “Caring for Plants”: A man survives a car accident that his wife does not, and his mother-in-law moves in to care for him in a rather bizarre manner. Pyun’s novel, The Hole, comes out in August.
NEXT TIME: My Book World
New Yorker Fiction 2017***—Excellent **July 3, 2017, Italo Calvino, “The Adventure of a Skier”: An Italian boy follows a Swiss girl up a ski slope, climbing past the end of the lift, to a rarified world of white hares and partridges.
NEXT TIME: My Book World
New Yorker Fiction 2017***—Excellent **June 26, 2017, William Trevor, “The Piano Teacher’s Pupil”: Compression is the primary gift of this story in which a woman, Elizabeth Nightingale, takes on a new young pupil whose genius she detects immediately. ¶ Soon after, following each boy’s lesson, Nightingale notices that little items begin to disappear: a snuff box, a porcelain swan, an earring, among a host of others. The thefts compel her to recall others more significant: the sixteen years she has given to a lover who would not leave his wife, the life she sacrifices for her father because he has given his to her. A master can break all the rules—no dialogue, perhaps too much exposition or telling—but Trevor does so with impeccable taste and grace. By story’s end we both adore and pity Miss Nightingale.
NEXT TIME: My Book World
New Yorker Fiction 2017***—Excellent ***June 19, 2017, Andrew Sean Greer, “It’s a Summer Day”: Arthur Less, a middle-aged American novelist, is flown to Turin, Italy, by the committee of a literary award, to attend the ceremony where he will or will not be awarded the top prize. ¶ Greer’s character, Less, is more by way of his burning wit (too many brilliant examples, like emeralds, to list here). The story is about an underrated writer (by himself as much as critics) who is only attending this ceremony to avoid the wedding of his former lover, Freddy. The story is peppered with bits of backstory about an earlier partner who has won a Pulitzer. Less seems to be among the right crowd, all right, but his ego is not quite buying it, when he delivers credit to his novel’s translator: “Less begins to imagine (as the mayor doodles on in Italian) that he has been mistranslated. Or, what is the word? Supertranslated? His novel given to an unacknowledged genius of a poet (Giuliana Senino is her name) who worked his mediocre English into breathtaking Italian. His book was ignored in America, barely reviewed, without a single interview request by a journalist (his publicist said, ‘Autumn is a bad time’), but, here in Italy, he understands he is taken seriously. In autumn, no less” (60). What any fine story does, by way of the specific, is to universalize the world, helping fellow human beings understand what it is like to have any part of us, but artistic endeavor in particular, held up to scrutiny by our peers. Greer’s new book, Less, (of which this story exists as the third chapter) is out in July.
Illustrated by Christoph Niemann NEXT TIME: My Book World
New Yorker Fiction 2017***—Excellent ***June 5 and 12, 2017, Curtis Sittenfeld, “Show Don’t Tell”: Ruth Flaherty, early forties, graduate of a writing MFA program at a prestigious Midwestern university, narrates this engaging story. ¶ Sittenfeld captures perfectly the ambiance of what it is like to be accepted into a graduate department of writers, only a fraction of whom are better than the rest: both the cattiness and genuineness of typewritten crits; food that is either hoarded or wasted; competition for fellowships not quite generous enough to live on, only enough to keep from starving as you teach undergrads (ugh) how to write fiction. As Ruth, the only person remaining sober at an after-party thrown for a famous grad of their program, drives this man to the airport following his reading, he apprises her of the “narcissism of small differences”: “‘Freud stole the concept from an English anthropologist named Ernest Crawley. It explains the infighting among groups whose members have far more in common than not. I’ve always thought that if any two students in the program were co-workers at a big company, they’d become close friends. They’d be thrilled to find another person who cares about what they care about, who thinks about things instead of just sleepwalking. But when you’re in the program there’s such an abundance of kindred spirits to choose from that those same two people might be mortal enemies’” (70). When Ruth finally arrives home she learns that she has won one of the four coveted fellowships that will finance her second year—$8,800 (1998)—and at one in the morning she screams near her open mailbox. The only person to share Ruth’s joy is a woman she hates, a fifty-five-year-old Lorraine, who, very mother-like, emerges from her door, and gives Ruth a hug. ¶ If you’ve been thrown in with writers anywhere, you’ve perhaps lived this story. If you’re only thinking of doing so, then this story may just convince you that every minute spent would be worth your time. Sittenfeld’s first collection, You Think It, I’ll Say It, comes out in 2018; her most recent novel, Eligible, was released in April.
Photograph by Carlos Javier Ortiz NEXT TIME: My Book World
New Yorker Fiction 2017***—Excellent ***June 5 and 12, 2017, Will Mackin, “Crossing the River No Name”: Some Navy seals in Afghanistan, in 2009, set out to ambush a group of Taliban. ¶ In this rich story the narrator relates two flashbacks, one rather lengthy, which seamlessly portray the complexities of wars and those intrepid souls who fight them. The author creates character more by interior shots and with zingy names such as Hugs and Cooker than by things visual. He creates character when the narrator encounters a vision of the Virgin Mary in a near-drowning situation. The narrative’s climax may occur when Hal, the Big Kahuna, disappears beneath the surface of a river that appears on no map, that virtually disappears in different seasons. Is Hal alive or not? The narrator apparently does not know because even though Hal is his best pal, he must carry out a mission of war. This story—with its rich imagery and figurative language—is the sort I love most, one that carries me into a world I would never encounter first-hand, nor want to, but with great skill Mr. Mackin snatches me up and returns me safely to my seat when he has finished with me. If I were awarding four stars it would receive five. The author’s debut collection, which I can’t wait to read, will come out in March 2018. Photograph by Carlos Javier Ortiz. NEXT TIME: New Yorker Summer Fiction Issue 2017
New Yorker Fiction 2017***—Excellent ** June 5 and 12, 2017, Sherman Alexie, “Clean, Cleaner, Cleanest”: In this compressed story a pious woman named Marie toils as a motel maid for many decades of her sixty-two years. Alexie’s memoir, You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me comes out this month.
NEXT TIME: New Yorker Summer Fiction Issue 2017
New Yorker Fiction 2017***—Excellent ***May 29, 2017, Samanta Schweblin, “The Size of Things”: Enrique, a wealthy young man who lives with his mother, is abruptly cast aside and begins to live in a toy shop he often patronizes. ¶ For his keep he reorganizes the store for the owner, arranging toys by color instead of type. Business booms! The author seems to withhold as much as she reveals about Enrique. Why has he been kicked out by his mother? Why is he so child-like? Why are his unconventional methods so successful? Readers only know what the store owner knows, and though an omission of detail would normally be a storytelling sin, it seems to work here. It allows me to imagine. The author’s book, Fever Dream, recently came out in English. Illustration by Ben Newman NEXT TIME: My Book World |
AUTHOR
Richard Jespers is a writer living in Lubbock, Texas, USA. See my profile at Author Central:
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