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Using Texting as a Metaphor

1/29/2018

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A  WRITER'S WIT
​How unbearable at times are people who are happy, people for whom everything works out.
Anton Chekhov
Born January 29, 1860
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A. Chekhov

My Literary World

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​Iron Horse Literary Review 19.4 Connections, “Like Breadcrumbs, Like Shards,” Lucas Southworth. Lucas Southworth won AWP’s Grace Paley Prize, in 2013, for his collection, Everyone Here Has a Gun. He is a professor of fiction and screenwriting at Loyola University Maryland in Baltimore.

“Like Breadcrumbs, Like Chards”:

Even though I am gay, came out a long time ago, have been with the same Grady for forty-two years, not until I reached the following sentence on the second page of Southworth's story did I realize I was reading about a gay couple.
 
“At first glance my husband fills so many gay stereotypes. He’s all muscle, all tank top on the weekends, all styled hair and double-entendre” (4).
 
Now . . . is my failed perception my fault or the writer’s? I’m willing to accept at least half the responsibility; I was lulled into the hackneyed convention that a husband must be paired with a wife, not another husband. But would it have been too unsophisticated to let the reader know this tidbit a wee bit earlier?
 
In this story where young marrieds are struggling to become acquainted, the narrator, Mike, often texts his husband Grady—even when they are located in the same dwelling or in the same room. Seriously? Has texting become so ubiquitous that it has seeped into our literary fiction? Must we now work texting into the weft of our stories for them to be real, to be truly au courant? Okay, okay. F. Scott, I’m sure, employed an early phone or two, had a character cable someone that he didn’t love her any longer. I am totally humble and down from my horse. Mike’s texting his husband is a manner in which he attempts both to be close to Grady and yet distant from him at the very same time.
 
At one point Mike uses an emoji of the Swiss flag (to indicate fidelity?) and in the same text a heart with an arrow shot through it to communicate his feelings. Is this how removed he is from the relationships with his husband, his mother, and mother-in-law, at least what he can find of his feelings?

Southworth purposely keeps the reader at a distance from the character’s feelings—not entirely but enough for us to get the message. We can see the words on the page, or the text on the screen, but I’m not sure we can feel them.

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-4 Louisiana

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Vacationing up a Lazy River

12/18/2017

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A WRITER'S WIT
There's absolutely nothing anyone can say about my mother or myself or my step-father that we haven't heard before. You'd have to be a Dickens or a Nabakov to come up with something really offensive.
​Tom Parker Bowles
Born December 18, 1974

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T. Parker Bowles

New Yorker Fiction 2017

***—Excellent
**   —Above Average 
*      —Average ​
**December 18 & 25, 2017, Zadie Smith, “The Lazy River”: A British family vacations on the metaphorical Lazy River in Almería, Spain. Smith’s latest novel is Swing Time, which came out last year.

NEXT TIME: ON HOLIDAY HIATUS UNTIL AFTER JANUARY 1, 2018
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Cat People Sneak Up On You

12/11/2017

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A WRITER'S WIT
If you don't have imagination, you stop being human; animals don't have imagination; Alzheimer's is the death of imagination. 
​Devdutt Pattanaik
Born December 11, 1970
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D. Pattanaik

New Yorker Fiction 2017

***—Excellent
**   —Above Average 
*      —Average ​
**December 11, 2017, Kristen Roupenian, “Cat Person”: Margot, a twenty-year-old college student who works at a movie theatre begins texting a young man who turns out to be thirty-four. 

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2017
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A Dog Story

12/4/2017

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A WRITERS' WIT
Time is strange. A moment can be as short as a breath, or as long as eternity.
​Cornell Woolrich
​Born December 4, 1903
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C. Woolrich

new yorker FICTION 2017

​***—Excellent
**   —Above Average 
*      —Average ​​
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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November 27th, 2017

11/27/2017

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A WRITER'S WIT
Changes are not only possible and predictable, but to deny them is to be an accomplice to one's own unnecessary vegetation.
​Gail Sheehy
​Born November 27, 1937
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G. Sheehy

New Yorker Fiction 2017

​***—Excellent
**   —Above Average 
*      —Average ​​
**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
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The Perfect Couple

11/20/2017

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A WRITER'S WIT
Fiction is a report from the interior. 
​Deborah Eisenberg
Born November 20, 1945
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D. Eisenberg

new yorker Fiction 2017

***—Excellent
**   —Above Average 
*      —Average ​​
**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
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Which Way to Turn

11/6/2017

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A WRITER'S WIT
At school, if I was ever bored in class, I would draw maps of islands or detailed interior of boats or lists of provisions and equipment I would need when I went camping in the summer.
​Michelle Magorian
Born November 6, 1947
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M. Magorian

New Yorker Fiction 2017

***—Excellent
**   —Above Average 
*      —Average ​​​
**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
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Fatherhood to the Max

10/30/2017

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A WRITER'S WIT
The secret of power is not that it corrupts; that is well known. What is never said is that power reveals.
Robert Caro
Master of the Senate
Born October 30,1935  
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R. Caro

New Yorker Fiction 2017

​***—Excellent
**   —Above Average 
*      —Average ​​​
PictureJohn Clang
​***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

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Strangler Bob and Other Freaks

10/23/2017

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A WRITER'S WIT
Arguably, no artist grows up: If he sheds the perceptions of childhood, he ceases being an artist. 
​Ned Rorem
Born October 23, 1923

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N. Rorem

New Yorker Fiction 2017

***—Excellent
**   —Above Average 
*      —Average ​​​
**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
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More Than One Snake

10/16/2017

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A WRITER'S WIT
Writers know that sometimes things are there in the drawer for decades before they finally come out and you are capable of writing about them. 
​Günter Grass
Born October 16, 1927

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G. Grass

New Yorker​ Fiction 2017

​***—Excellent
**   —Above Average 
*      —Average ​​​
**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
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To Like or Not to Like

10/9/2017

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A WRITER'S WIT
To learn to get along without, to realize that what the world is going to demand of us may be a good deal more important than what we are entitled to demand of it—this is a hard lesson. 
​Bruce Catton
Born October 9, 1899
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B. Catton

New Yorker​ Fiction 2017

​***—Excellent
**   —Above Average 
*      —Average ​​​
**​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 
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Memorial with a Hole in It

10/2/2017

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A WRITER'S WIT
Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.
​Graham Greene
Born October 2, 1904

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G. Greene

New Yorker​ Fiction 2017

​***—Excellent
**   —Above Average 
*      —Average ​​​
**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
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A Bachelor Party to Remember

9/25/2017

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A WRITER'S WIT
Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.
​William Faulkner
Born September 25, 1897
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W. Faulkner

New Yorker​ Fiction 2017

​***—Excellent
**   —Above Average 
*      —Average ​​​
**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
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Negotiating That Last Sunset

9/18/2017

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A WRITER'S WIT
I think it may not be a coincidence that the rise of printing and book publication and literacy and the phenomenon of best sellers all preceded the humanitarian reforms of the Enlightenment.
​Steven Pinker
Born September 18, 1954
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S. Pinker

New Yorker​ Fiction 2017

​***—Excellent
**   —Above Average 
*      —Average ​​​
**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
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When a Bowl Is Not Just a Bowl

9/4/2017

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A WRITER'S WIT
I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all.
Richard Wright
Born September 4, 1908
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R. Wright

New Yorker Fiction 2017

***—Excellent
**   —Above Average 
*      —Average ​​​
**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
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Running Scared

8/28/2017

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 A WRITER'S WIT
Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Born August 28, 1749
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Goethe

New Yorker Fiction 2017

***—Excellent
**   —Above Average 
*      —Average ​​
PictureCromwell | Rea
***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
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The Difficulty of Calming Shame

8/21/2017

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A WRITER'S WIT
I worked at Sears as a salesperson when I was in college. Makes me nicer to folks to have to stand all day and be nice to picky people.
​Sharon M. Draper
​Born August 21, 1948
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S. Draper

New Yorker Fiction 2017

​***—Excellent
**   —Above Average 
*      —Average ​​
PictureTillmans | Zwirner
​***​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

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Our Desires Elude Us

8/7/2017

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A WRITER'S WIT
Early in my career, I decided not to do sequels. I know that children enjoy them, but I valued the feeling that this was the only time I would write about these characters. I felt it gave me an added incentive to do my best by them, to tell readers everything I knew, to hold nothing back.
​Betsy Byars
Born August 7, 1928
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B. Byars

New Yorker Fiction 2017

​***—Excellent
**   —Above Average 
*      —Average ​​
PictureRichard McGuire
​***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

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Christina Is Astonishing

7/31/2017

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A WRITER'S WIT
I did not have a mobile phone in 1993. No one did, except the occasional banker or Hollywood star seeming smart, or the main character in American Psycho. In 1993, every day was “Let's get lost.” I could walk Greenwich Village for hours and not be found.
​Elizabeth Wurtzel
Born July 31, 1967
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E. Wurtzel

New Yorker Fiction 2017

​***—Excellent
**   —Above Average 
*      —Average ​​
**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
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Dangerous Crossing

7/24/2017

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A WRITER'S WIT
My art teacher in junior high was a very out gay man and a mentor to me. He would tell us about Greenwich Village and show us The Village Voice and describe his life, but it was all sort of subversive and below the radar.
​Gus van Sant
Born July 24, 1952
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G. van Sant

New Yorker Fiction 2017

​***—Excellent
**   —Above Average 
*      —Average ​​
PictureJon Lowenstein
***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
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Surviving the Accidents of Life

7/10/2017

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A WRITER'S WIT
Numerous politicians have seized absolute power and muzzled the press. Never in history has the press seized absolute power and muzzled the politicians.
​David Brinkley
Born July 10, 1920
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D. Brinkley

New Yorker Fiction 2017

***—Excellent
**   —Above Average 
*      —Average ​​
**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
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Rarified World of Skiing

7/3/2017

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A WRITER'S WIT
Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.
​Tom Stoppard
Born July 3, 1937
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T. Stoppard

New Yorker Fiction 2017

***—Excellent
**   —Above Average 
*      —Average ​
**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 
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William Trevor's Final New Yorker Story

6/26/2017

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A WRITER'S WIT
Every year the literary press praises dozens if not hundreds of novels to the skies, asserting explicitly or implicitly that these books will probably not be suffering water damage in the basements of their authors' houses twenty years from now. But historically, anyway, that's not the way the novelistic ecology works.
​Lev Grossman
Born June 26, 1969
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L. Grossman

New Yorker Fiction 2017

***—Excellent
**   —Above Average 
*      —Average ​
**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
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Very PRIZE-WORTHY

6/19/2017

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A WRITER'S WIT
When I read a book, I like to be surprised. I don't want to read the same genre formula that I've read a hundred times before. 
​Chet Williamson
Born June 19, 1948

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C. Williamson

New Yorker Fiction 2017

​***—Excellent
**   —Above Average 
*      —Average ​​here to edit.
PictureChristoph Niemann
​***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
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Showing and Telling

6/12/2017

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A WRITER'S WIT
Men who pass most comfortably through the world are those who possess good digestions and hard hearts.
​Harriet Martineau
​Born June 12, 1802
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H. Martineau

New Yorker Fiction 2017

***—Excellent
**   —Above Average 
*      —Average ​​here to edit.
PictureOrtiz
***​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
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    AUTHOR
    Richard Jespers is a writer living in Lubbock, Texas, USA.

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