A WRITER'S WIT  . . . we wear the mask that grins and lies, it hides our cheeks and shades our eyes—this debt we pay to human guile; with torn and bleeding hearts we smile. Paul Laurence Dunbar Born June 27, 1872

New Yorker Fiction 2016

Grant Cornett

“Child-hating was not a pretense for Mother, the jokey exasperation of a sentimental woman, who spoke of her children insincerely as rug rats and burdens. She had already raised seven of them, plus the ghost of Angela—why more? Children bored her, they irritated her, they were always in the way. Worst of all, they took attention away from her” (62).

“Mother smiled at the slumping, soggy cake, topped with eight lurid pineapple slices, most of them with a cherry in the middle, two with candles, and, on the sloping side, “MOTHER” spelled out in shaky worm-cast piping, with scrolls and roses around it.
     ‘Make a wish, Ma,’ Franny said. ‘Pineapple upside-down cake. Your favorite’” (61).

A WRITER'S WIT I do find the sibling connection endlessly fascinating, as I do all family dynamics. I like how siblings seem to create their own parentless mini-civilization within a family, one that has its own laws, myths, language, humor, its own loyalties and treacheries. Jandy Nelson Born June 24, 1965

My Book World

A WRITER'S WIT Revision has its own peculiar pleasures and its own peculiar frustrations. The ground rules are already established; the characters already exist. You don't have to bring the characters to life, but you do have to make them more convincing. Vikram Seth Born June 20, 1952

New Yorker Fiction 2016

Luke Pearson

“In the living room, roars of studio laughter erupted from the television; Cillian and the Bog Girl were watching a sitcom about a Canadian trailer park” (61).

“He was not who she’d expected to find when she opened her eyes, either. Now neither teen-ager needed to tell the other that it was over. It simply was—and, without another sound, the Bog Girl let go of Cillian and slipped backward into the bog water” (69).

A WRITER'S WIT I hate the idea of sheltering kids from challenging books. It's just another form of conservative fear that promotes ignorance more than anything else. Adam Rapp Born June 15, 1968

New Yorker Summer Fiction 2016

Each summer The New Yorker magazine publishes several short stories in a single issue. The implication is that one will tuck this issue under one's arm, take it to the beach, and read it from cover to cover. I wish. This profile of Jonathan Foer's story is the fourth in a series of four. —RJ

Mirka Laura Severa

“‘It was a hard day,’ Tamir said.
‘Yes, but the day has been decades.’
‘But it’s felt like only a few seconds, right?’
‘Whenever someone asks me how I’m doing, I find myself saying, “I’m going through a passage.” Everything is a transition, a stop on the way to the destination, turbulence. But I’ve been saying it for so long I should probably accept that the rest of my life is going to be one long passage: an hourglass with no bulbs.’
Tamir leaned over and in a low voice, almost whispering, said, ‘You are innocent.’
‘What?’ Jacob said.
‘You are innocent.’
‘Thank you.’
He pulled back and said, ‘No, like, too trusting. Too childlike.’” (77).

A WRITER'S WIT Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force. Dorothy L. Sayers Born June 13, 1893

New Yorker Summer Fiction 2016

Each summer The New Yorker magazine publishes several short stories in a single issue. The implication is that one will tuck this issue under one's arm, take it to the beach, and read it from cover to cover. I wish. This profile of Langston Hughes's previously unpublished story is the third in a series of four. —RJ

Illustration by Noé Sandas

“It was a Dizzy Gillespie record, and what it said without words summed up the situation pretty well. It was not that room but the world in that room that was in the record. The music was uranium, and those seven people, had they been super-duper spies, could not have known more about atomic energy—that is, its reason for being a mighty way of dying, “Oh, but I do” being a component” (61).

A WRITER'S WIT Most children—I know I did when I was a kid—fantasize another set of parents. Or fantasize no parents. They don't tell their real parents about that—you don't want to tell Mom and Dad. Kids lead a very private life. And I was a typical child, I think. I was a liar. Maurice Sendak Born June 10, 1928

My Book World

“Mailer had been going on for years about the diseases of America, its oncoming totalitarianism, its oppressiveness, its smog—he had written so much about the disease he had grown bored with his own voice, weary of his own petulance; the war in Vietnam offered therefore the grim pleasure of confirming his ideas. The disease he had written about existed now in open air: so he pushed further in his thoughts—the paradox of this obscene unjust war is that it provided him new energy—even as it provided new energy to the American soldiers who were fighting it.
 
“He came at last to the saddest conclusion of them all for it went beyond the war in Vietnam. He had come to decide that the center of America might be insane. The country had been living with a controlled, even fiercely controlled, schizophrenia which had been deepening with the years. Perhaps the point had now been passed. Any man or woman who was devoutly Christian and worked for the American Corporation, had been caught in an unseen vise whose pressure could split their mind from their soul. For the center of Christianity was a mystery, a son of God, and the center of the corporation was a detestation of mystery, a worship of technology. Nothing was more intrinsically opposed to technology than the bleeding heart of Christ. The average American, striving to do his duty, drove further every day into working for Christ, and drove equally further each day in the opposite direction—into working for the absolute computer of the corporation” (188).
 
“Christians had been able to keep some kind of sanity for centuries while countenancing love against honor, desire versus duty, even charity opposed in the same heart to the lust for power—that was difficult to balance but not impossible. The love of the Mystery of Christ, however, and the love of no Mystery whatsoever, had brought the country to a state of suppressed schizophrenia so deep that the foul brutalities of the war in Vietnam were the only temporary cure possible for the condition—since the expression of brutality offers a definite if temporary relief to the schizophrenic” (188).

A WRITER'S WIT A young musician plays scales in his room and only bores his family. A beginning writer, on the other hand, sometimes has the misfortune of getting into print. Marguerite Yourcenar Born June 8, 1903

New Yorker Summer Fiction 2016

Each summer The New Yorker magazine publishes several short stories in a single issue. The implication is that one will tuck this issue under one's arm, take it to the beach, and read it from cover to cover. I wish. This profile of Ben Lerner's story is the second in a series of four. —RJ

Ben Wiseman

A WRITER'S WIT Calculus, the electrical battery, the telephone, the steam engine, the radio—all these groundbreaking innovations were hit upon by multiple inventors working in parallel with no knowledge of one another. Steven Johnson Born June 6, 1968

New Yorker Summer Fiction 2016

Each summer The New Yorker magazine publishes several short stories in a single issue. The implication is that one will tuck this issue under one's arm, take it to the beach, and read it from cover to cover. I wish. This profile of Zadie Smith's story is the first in a series of four. —RJ

Richard Mosse

A WRITER'S WIT A lot of compelling stories in the world aren't being told, and the fact that people don't know about them compounds the suffering. Anderson Cooper Born June 3, 1967

My Book World

Therese senses a certain role she’s been playing with regard to Carol and their magical trip westward. “But at moments she felt like an actor, remembered only now and then her identity with a sense of surprise, as if she had been playing in these last days the part of someone else, someone fabulously and excessively lucky” (174).
 
“Therese squeezed the wheel, then deliberately relaxed. She sensed a tremendous sorrow hanging over them, ahead of them, that was just beginning to reveal the edge of itself, that they were driving into. She remembered the detective’s face and the barely legible expression that she realized now was malice. It was malice she had seen in his smile, even as he said he was on no side, and she could feel in him a desire that was actually personal to separate them, because he knew they were together. She had seen just now what she had only sensed before, that the whole world was ready to be their enemy, and suddenly what she and Carol had together seemed no longer love or anything happy but a monster between them, with each of them caught in a fist” (199).
 
“‘But the most important point I did not mention and was not thought of by anyone—that the rapport between two men or two women can be absolute and perfect, as it can never be between man and woman, and perhaps some people want just this, as others want that more shifting and uncertain thing that happens between men and women’” (221).
 
And here is the final paragraph I mentioned before: “She stood in the doorway, looking over the people at the tables in the room where a piano played. The lights were not bright, and she did not see her at first, half hidden in the shadow against the far wall, facing her. Nor did Carol see her. A man sat opposite here, Therese did not know who. Carol raised her hand slowly and brushed her hair back, once on either side, and Therese smiled because the gesture was Carol, and it was Carol she loved and would always love. Oh, in a different way now, because she was a different person, and it was like meeting Carol all over again, but it was still Carol and no one else. It would be Carol, in a thousand cities, a thousand houses, in foreign lands where they would go together, in heaven and in hell. Therese waited. Then as she was about to go to her, Carol saw here, seemed to stare at her incredulously a moment while Therese watched the slow smile growing, before her arm lifted suddenly, her hand waved a quick, eager greeting that Therese had never see before. Therese walked toward her” (248-9). Just like the film!