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New Yorker Summer Fiction Issue 2015—Karen Russell

6/11/2015

A WRITER'S WIT
Writing means being a fascinated slave to current events.
Allan Gurganus
Born June 11, 1947

Prospects Are Great

Sara Cwynar

June 8 & 15, 2015, Karen Russell, “The Prospectors”: Jean and Clara, women in their early twenties, flee from 1930s Florida to Oregon, where they continue to prospect, or relieve others of their valuables. ¶ At one point the two women catch a chairlift and travel up a mountain to what they believe is the grand opening of the Evergreen Lodge, an opulent structure, where many wealthy people will be gathered. Jean and Clara are welcomed, however, into a very similar but different lodge, the Emerald. Here the story takes a very odd and unexpected turn. The reader must suspend all disbelief, that is, enjoy or appreciate the genre of fantasy! Russell is quite a wordsmith, possessing the ability to hold one’s prolonged attention, as her characters invite you into their lives. She is most well known for her novel, Swamplandia!
Sara Cwynar, Photographer-Illustrator

NEXT TIME: I won't post until the end of June. Until then please feel free to peruse the archives, particularly those concerning my collection, My Long-Playing Records and Other Stories. (Below)

BEHIND THE BOOK: My Long-Playing Records & Other Stories. In these posts I speak of the creative process I use to write each story. Buy a copy here!

Date of Original Post:
11/13/14 — Introduction to My Long-Playing Records
11/20/14 — "My Long-Playing Records" — The Story
11/27/14 — "A Certain Kind of Mischief"
12/04/14 — "Ghost Riders"
12/11/14 — "The Best Mud"
12/18/14 — "Handy to Some"
12/25/14 — "Blight"
01/01/15 — "A Gambler's Debt"
01/09/15 — "Tales of the Millerettes"
01/15/15 — "Men at Sea"
01/22/15 — "Basketball Is Not a Drug"
01/29/15 — "Engineer"
02/05/15 — "Snarked"
02/12/15 — "Killing Lorenzo"
02/19/15 — "The Age I Am Now"
02/26/15 — "Bathed in Pink"

My Long-Playing Records Podcasts:
03/12/15 — "A Certain Kind of Mischief"
03/26/15 — "The Best Mud"
04/02/15 — "Handy to Some"
04/09/15 — "Tales of the Millerettes"
04/16/15 — "Men at Sea"
04/23/15 — "My Long-Playing Records"
04/30/15 — "Basketball Is Not a Drug"
05/07/15 — "Snarked"
05/21/15 — "Killing Lorenzo"
05/28/15 — "Bathed in Pink"
Watch for more podcasts later this summer!

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New Yorker Summer Fiction Issue 2015—J. Franzen

6/11/2015

A WRITER'S WIT
A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted. You should live several lives while reading it.
William Styron
Born June 11, 1925

No Bad TAste Here

Sara Cwynar

June 8 & 15, 2015, Jonathan Franzen, “The Republic of Bad Taste”: If I’d been at the beach when I read this 16,000+ word story, I would have come away charred on all four sides of my body, so engrossed I would have become in its rich fabric! In the two years leading up to the reunification of Germany, young Andreas Wolf, counselor, falls in love with Annagret, a fifteen-year-old girl who seeks his help with a fairly knotty problem. ¶ Seems that Annagret’s mother is a drug addict and could lose her job if found out, and the girl’s stepfather is abusing her, mildly at first, then ready to move in for the kill, when she comes to the priest-like man Andreas, who lives a secular life in the basement of an East Berlin church. No spoilers here. You must read this long story to savor the elegance of Franzen’s prose, be reminded of the intelligence of his novels, The Corrections, his The Twenty-Seventh City! This story is worth every second of your time. Franzen’s novel, Purity, is out in September.
Photo Illustration by Sara Cwynar.

New Yorker Summer Fiction Issue 2015—Primo Levi

6/11/2015

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A WRITER'S WIT
If the landscape changes, then I don't know who I am either. The landscape is a refracted auto- biography. As it disappears you lose your sense of self.
Iain Sinclair
Born June 11, 1943

The Big Question

Sara Cwynar

June 8 & 15, 2015, Primo Levi, “Quaestio De Centauris”: After a long introduction, which is necessary for Levi to set up his mythological premise, the narrator tells the shameful tale of how he allows himself to be coupled with Teresa De Simone, when it is centaur Trachi who really wishes to woo her. ¶ Trachi goes on a rampage with mares all across the countryside to prove his potency. Levi leads us to believe that Trachi then morphs into a dolphin—never to be seen again! This is one of the more believable tales of this sort that I’ve read, largely because Levi goes to such great lengths to massage the reader’s suspension of disbelief—not that you believe, but that you see how such a beautiful lie could be true. Levi’s Complete Works is out in September.
Sara Cwynar, Photographer-Illustrator.

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New Yorker Summer Fiction Issue 2015—Jonathan Foer

6/11/2015

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A WRITER'S WIT
The knowledge that makes us cherish innocence makes inno- cence unattainable.
Irving Howe
Born June 11, 1920

Paradise Not What It Used to Be

Mike Ellis

June 8 & 15, 2015, Jonathan Safran Foer, “Love is Blind and Deaf”: Foer reimagines how Adam and Eve occupy “paradise” in this narrative. The author humanizes the couple to the point that they seem like an ordinary duo trying to survive in any cramped urban environment, except that they are presumably in paradise. “It worked until it didn’t work” seems to be the couple’s philosophy and a realistic condition in which they live. End of story. Foer’s most recognized work may his 2005 novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Clear.
Mike Ellis, Illustrator.

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New Yorker Summer Fiction Issue 2015—Zadie Smith

6/11/2015

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A WRITER'S WIT
Calumnies are answered best with silence.
Ben Jonson
Born June 11, 1572

The theme of this year's The New Yorker Summer Fiction issue is "Secret Histories," and these five stories provide a little something for everyone! Take them to the beach or on your trip and enjoy! (Scroll up to read the profiles in the order that each story appears in the magazine.)

Escape for Everyone

Sara Cwynar

June 8 & 15, 2015, Zadie Smith, “Escape from New York”: Michael, Marlon, and Elizabeth—best buds—flee their totally Upper West Side milieu when the city is attacked in a familiar 9-1-1 scenario. Seems a bit passé to be writing about the (real or imagined) 9-1-1 as this trio rent a “smelly Toyota Camry” and hightail it to Pennsylvania and beyond. Oh . . . turns out this is the 9-1-1 scenario. Yet I must confess that I carefully peruse those “urban legend” headlines found on tabloids as I pay for groceries, and I’ve never heard of this one in which Michael Jackson, Elizabeth Taylor, and Marlon Brandon all escape the city thusly! I also have to confess I had to read the magazine’s “This Week in Fiction” blog’s interview with author Smith to learn of her method for developing the madness of this story. I believe Smith had more fun writing it than I had in reading it. The key to getting the story from the very start may entirely rest on Sara Cwynar’s illustration, in which Michael Jackson’s famed glove is the primary image. Shame on me for missing it. Smith’s most recent book is NW: a Novel.
Sara Cwynar, Illustrator

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Author Elizabeth Strout Can Do No Wrong

6/2/2015

A WRITER'S WIT
How absurd and delicious it is to be in love with somebody younger than yourself. Everybody should try it.
Barbara Pym
Born June 2, 1913

My Book World

Strout, Elizabeth. The Burgess Boys: a Novel. New York: Random, 2013.

I greatly admire Strout’s Pulitzer Prize-winning work, Olive Kitteridge, primarily for her extraordinary ability to develop fascinating yet everyday characters, people like us, who, if pushed, might be transformed into someone else, someone unmanageable, someone unimaginable—flawed characters whom we both love and detest before we’ve finished reading the book, rather like people in our lives whom we both love and detest.

In The Burgess Boys three adult children having grown up in the same home, yet each with a different childhood to show for it, are thrown together once again when Susan’s son, Zachary, tosses a frozen pig’s head through a mosque window in their small New England town of Shirley Falls. “During prayer. During Ramadan”(19). Yikes.

Brothers Jim and Bob, who both live in New York City, return to see if they can be of help. And, in fact, this event sets in motion a study of what can happen to siblings who experience a childhood trauma and never really work through it, comprehend it, because life moves on, quickly trying to return itself to a normalcy that can’t really occur until all have resolved their problems.

Sprout carries her understanding even farther by getting inside the head of Abdikarim, a key Muslim resident of Shirley Falls:

“And he felt too old to learn English. Without that, he lived with the constancy of incomprehension. In the post office last month he had mimed and pointed to a square white box, the woman in her blue shirt repeating and repeating and he did not know and everyone in the post office knew and finally a man came to him and crossed his arms quickly toward the floor, saying, ‘Fini!’ And so Abdikarim thought the post office was finished with him and he must go and he did go. Later he found out the post office was out of the boxes they had sitting on the shelf with price tags on them. Why did they show them if they did not have them to sell? Again, the incomprehension. He came to understand this had a danger altogether different from the dangers in the camp. Living in a world where constantly one turned and touched incompre- hension—they did not comprehend, he did not comprehend—gave the air the lift of uncertainty and this seemed to wear away something in him, always he felt unsure of what he wanted, what he thought, even what he felt” (94).

This passage is exhausting by way of its ability to place us in the shoes of someone else and vice versa. Not understanding one another under any circumstances is exhausting, not only for the body but the spirit, and its pressures cannot continue to build without dire consequences. And Sprout, through The Burgess Boys allows us to experience this unabated incomprehension, not only through a so-called foreigner, but through siblings who are foreign to one another—without having to leave the comfort of our chair. A fine read for anyone who is having difficulty comprehending a neighbor or loved one.

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2015

New Yorker Summer Fiction Issue 2015—Karen Russell

Prospects Are Great

New Yorker Summer Fiction Issue 2015—J. Franzen

No Bad TAste Here

New Yorker Summer Fiction Issue 2015—Primo Levi

The Big Question

New Yorker Summer Fiction Issue 2015—Jonathan Foer

Paradise Not What It Used to Be

New Yorker Summer Fiction Issue 2015—Zadie Smith

Escape for Everyone

Author Elizabeth Strout Can Do No Wrong

My Book World

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