New Yorker Project 3 - The Big Middle

A WRITER'S WIT
“I went to jail to preserve the time-honored principle that a journalist must respect a promise not to reveal the identity of a confidential source. The principle was more important to uphold than my personal freedom.”
Judith Miller
Born January 2, 1948

The Big Middle

These stories, too, are strong, (A- or B+) satisfying, but may possess some quirk that does not amuse me, and I usually describe it in brief.

Adam Stennett

18. January 7, 2013, Rivka Galchen, “The Lost Order”: The anonymous narrator apparently resigns from her job as a corporate lawyer and has trouble handling unemployment. ¶ The reader is drawn in by the narrator’s apparent honesty. Okay. Why is she on the couch almost pretending to be a carry-out Chinese place when she’s gets a wrong number? All the answers are delivered in the last three columns of the narrative. Certain stories are successful because their authors break the rules (like giving a reader all the answers in the last few paragraphs) and get away with it. To write this story any other way would be to make it a non-story. To learn of her unreliable-narrator problems at the end is the only way . . . or is it? Author of Atmospheric Disturbances.
Adam Stennett, Illustrator

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Eve Arnold

19. January 14, 2013, William Trevor, “The Women”: In an earlier time perhaps, a young girl is spied on by two older women: Miss Keble and Miss Cotell. ¶ The women dare approach Cecilia with gifts after they see her in a school performance. One woman reveals a secret of Cecilia’s past, a secret that puts her entire life in a new perspective. Trevor provides a beautiful layering of the story, to which the readers are privy to two alternating points of view, making it more novel-like. I quite enjoyed Trevor's My House in Umbria, both the novel and the film.
Eve Arnold, Photographer

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Martin Ansin

20. February 4, 2013, Nicole Krauss, “Zusya on the Roof”: This is a compressed story of Brodman’s life, steeped in Hebrew tradition to the point that it squelches him. ¶ Like a poet, Krauss travels back and forth between the concrete and the abstract, in a manner in which the result is delivered like a beautiful child: 

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“When he left the apartment, he locked the door quietly behind him, and on his back he carried his mother, with her blue ankles, and his stooped father, and their parents, too, dead in a trench at the edge of a pine forest” (64). The crux of Brodman's life: “He had allowed himself to be crushed by duty. He had failed to fully become himself, had instead given in to ancient pressures” (65). 

From the specific, concrete details, Krauss limns the abstract universality of millions of readers, whether they see this story or not. They will live it. Krauss is the author of Great House.
Martin Ansin, Illustrator

Zohar Lazar

21. February 11 & 18, 2013, Zadie Smith, “The Embassy of Cambodia”: Fatou, a young woman is employed as a maid in Northwest London and is treated in a rather cavalier manner by this Pakistani family. ¶ Oddly, Smith uses the first person plural (“we, the people of Willesden”), the manner in which Hawthorne does in The Scarlet Letter or as Cheever does in his Wapshot novels, but why? one wonders. It seems to bear no great purpose. ¶ The story is so full of rich contradictions—like one sees in everyday life. The richest may be when Fatou performs the Heimlich maneuver on the eldest daughter in the home, thus saving the wretch’s life. Yet, on the very same day, when Fatou confesses that she has forgotten to remove lamb from the freezer for the evening meal, the woman of the house is furious. Fatou eventually loses the job, but she doesn’t much care. Smith is the author of NW.
Zohar Lazar, Illustrator

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Grant Cornett

22. March 11, 2013, Will Mackin, “Kattekoppen”: Soldiers in Afghanistan search out and bring back two bodies of their fallen comrades. ¶ Mackin does a phenomenal job of representing the Dutch dialect on paper (as one with Dutch relatives I can attest). It is this eye and ear for detail that brings this story alive. Why do some of us avert our eyes upon hearing a war story, and others of us eat it up as if it were a piece of rotten-tasting candy? Some may be envious that this is Mackin’s first story in a major magazine, but he tells a tale that no one else can tell, and we should hear it, read it, taste it in its fullness.
Grant Cornett, Photographer

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Chiara Goia

23. March 25, 2013, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, “The Judge’s Will”: An old judge in Delhi bequeaths money to his longtime mistress, Phul, and his wife Binny must determine whether she will carry out his wishes. ¶ The story’s significance seems to be lost on me. Is it that the jealous wife, finally, in the end understands that she must care for the helpless Phul (flower)? There seems to be no fanning out from there. The son Yasi’s growth as a character? The judge’s growth? Is it only Binny who, almost begrudgingly, agrees to care for Puhl after the judge’s death? And perhaps that is the point, the strong tie to the title of the story. The judge’s will—not just his written document, but his utter desire—is what is all important. Not any other person’s. The late author was a Merchant/Ivory script writer and novelist of Heat and Dust.
Chiara Goia, Photographer. Extraordinary photographs!

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Beata Boucht

24. April 8, 2013, Tessa Hadley, “Valentine”: A young teenage couple in 1970s London—Stella and Valentine—become enamored with one another. ¶ Sometimes it is so difficult to capture the past, yet Hadley does manage at times to make this story fresh, though we’ve all read or even lived it somewhere before. Hadley’s novel Clever Girl will be out early in 2014.
Beata Boucht, Illustrator

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Owen Freeman

25. April 22, 2013, Roberto Bolaño, “Mexican Manifesto”: The male narrator and his girl friend Laura frequent Turkish baths in Mexico City for the purpose of titillating themselves into a sex life, or so it seems.  ¶ Homoerotic in spite of Bolaño’s efforts to make this a heterosexual story, this tale reveals the dehumanizing yet comforting nature of the Turkish bath, where people become part of the hard yet melting landscape:

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“The color of the pool’s rocks, doubtless the saddest color I saw in the course of our expeditions, comparable only to the color of some faces, workers in the hallways, whom I no longer remember, but who were certainly there” (101).

Owen Freeman, Illustrator

Weegee

26. May 6, 2013, Jonathan Lethem, “The Gray Goose”: Miriam, raised by Communist parents until her father returns to Germany, seeks to continue their rebellion. ¶ This is an absorbing, enjoyable story with a great deal of information. Much of the narrative occurs on one night in which Miriam tries heartily to lose her innocence, and if her mother wouldn’t burst into Miriam’s room as her boy blurts "his goop into her palm,” (70), Miriam might accomplish her goal. But perhaps not, given her boy friend’s sensitivity to touch. ¶ A Burl Ives song about the gray goose seems to be the author’s choice for a certain motif. Miriam finally, at age seventeen, realizes the gray goose is emblematic of her mother, the Communist revolutionary, Rose Angrush Zimmer: And the knife couldn’t cut ‘em, Lord, Lord, Lord! And the fork couldn’t stick ‘im, Lord, Lord, Lord. Lethem’s most recent novel is Dissident Gardens.
Weegee/ICP/Getty, Archive

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Tim Flach

27. May 13, 2013, Fiona McFarlane, “Art Appreciation”: Henry Taylor, twenty-eight, believes his ship has come in when his mother wins £10,000 in the Australian lottery, circa 1961, and he seeks to marry a young woman in the insurance office where he works. ¶ In this story the world of art seems to collide with that of materialism. Ellie, Henry’s fiancée, attends Friday night art appreciation lectures and is from an educated family of modest means. Henry is now counting money before it has been given to him. With such a windfall and in light of Henry’s otherwise good fortune, he finds it difficult to see who likes him for himself and who likes him for his money. ¶ The situation colors how he views women, his mother, his mother’s fiancé. The story ends with Henry’s acceptance of his lot: a mother who more than likely will not share her wealth with her son but with her newfound mate. Even though this is an Australian story, funny how the British notion of class still seems to seep into the narrative, as if it just can’t be helped. McFarlane’s novel The Night Guest was published in October.
Tim Flach, “Kinda Ready”

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Brendan Monroe

28. May 20, 2013, Ben Marcus, “The Dark Arts”: A young American man, Julian Bledstein (hm), spends a cold February in Düsseldorf, Germany, taking experimental treatments for an inexplicable autoimmune disease that has been untreatable at home. ¶ The clinic doctors suck his own marrow out and in some way inject it back into his body, perhaps among other procedures, all failing to make him, Julian, feel better. His female companion, Hayley, has sent him ahead, probably to evade, for a while, his misery, which includes staying in a male hostel, where other young men crawl into each others’ cots for comfort in the dark. One day Hayley appears, and Julian can’t bring himself to tell her that now there is a tumor inside his head. The doctors can do nothing for him. He walks off and leaves her standing in a frigid German wind with nowhere to go. Marcus’s story collection Leaving the Sea is out soon from Knopf.
Brendan Monroe, Illustrator

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Balint Zsako

29. May 27, 2013, Steven Millhauser, “Thirteen Wives”: Man recounts his thirteen wives with whom he (apparently) lives simultaneously. ¶ I say “apparently” because one is really not sure. At the outset the story seems quite literal, though one’s credulity is stretched by the fact that in most Western cultures polygamy is disallowed. Then one wonders if the thirteen wives aren’t all different aspects of the same woman. After all, how could he find time to do all the things he must do with each wife, including make love to her? When one sees that wife number eleven is quite ill (but not near death), maybe each “wife” has been the same woman but at a different stage of her life. ¶ Frankly, the story seems to be one of those exercises that writers design for themselves to keep themselves interested, though the exercise may not mean much to the rest of us. Or am I being lazy? Millhauser’s We Others: New and Selected Stories was published in 2011.
Balint Zsako,  Illustrator

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Victo Ngai

30. June 3, 2013, Akhil Sharma, “We Didn’t Like Him”: Manshu is a self-centered boy, who continues his ways into adulthood, where he cheats friends, family, and strangers alike. ¶ The reader learns much about Hindi customs in this story: rituals for death of family members, mostly. The narrator doesn’t care much for Manchu, his “father’s sister’s husband’s sister’s son” (57)—quite a distant relationship by comparison to Western culture. ¶ The narrator covers nearly an entire lifetime as the reader watches Manshu continue to cheat the family. So strong, however, are the bonds of family and ritual that the narrator continues to allow Manshu to use him—even though he doesn’t like Manshu. ¶ So different is this tale about duty, compared to our own culture, where often siblings and first cousins can easily fade from our care, certainly from our memory. But no matter who you are it is instructive. Sharma is the author of An Obedient Father.
Victo Ngai, Illustrator

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Goodman, Cornett, Thornton

31. June 10 & 17, 2013, Ed Park, “Slide to Unlock”: The persona of what seems like a prose poem ponders the efficacy of passwords in contemporary life, when someone with a gun stands behind you at an ATM. ¶ A very impersonal story, with no protagonist unless it is the ever-present “you.” A very chilling tale, however, because it could happen (if it hasn’t already) to any of you. Always thinking of new yet clever and more powerful passwords so that no one can invade your private yet so public lives. The first paragraph says it all:

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“You cycle through your passwords. They tell the secret story. What’s most important to you, the things you think can’t be deciphered. Words and numbers stored in the lining of your heart” (62).

Park’s debut novel, Personal Days, was released in 2008.
Timothy Goodman, Lettering
Grant Cornett, Photographer
Lawrence Thornton/Getty, Archive

Goodman, Cornett

32. June 10 & 17, 2013, Sherman Alexie, “Happy Trails”: The narrator provides a sort of eulogy for his late uncle, Hector, who has been dead for over forty years. ¶ The story is also a brief paean to the First Nations culture, Uncle Hector symbolic of all Indians who were (are) killed simply because they were (are) Indians. Alexie always amazes me at his fresh yet uniquely Indian turn of phrase and meaning:   

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“Then at the graveside, as the starlings pulled down the sun and the mosquitoes raised the moon, it was just my mother and me. She whisper-sang an old mourning song” (65).

And he ends with the proclamation:

“Standing in the cemetery, I felt like the only Indian that mattered and the only Indian that didn’t. I was alive, damn it, and I planned to live longer than every other Indian in the world” (65).

Alexie’s Blasphemy: New and Selected Stories was released in October.
Timothy Goodman, Lettering
Grant Cornett, Photographer
Art Wolfe/Getty, Archive

Chris Steele-Perkins/Magnum

33. June 24, 2013, Thomas McGuane, “Stars”: Jessica Ramírez, a female astronomer/professor, antagonizes nearly every person with whom she comes in contact in the mountainous university town where she lives. ¶ McGuane, unlike some male writers, is quite capable of occupying the center of a female character. Though we do not learn immediately the source of Jessica’s anger, we certainly see its alienating effects. Early in the story Jessica witnesses a man about to shoot a wolf he’s trapped, and it angers her. Later at the dog park, she’s ired by the passive nature of the canines found there. These both may be Jessica: trapped by having to work among civilized beings, discontent because she has always been wild like the wolf and she always will be.

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“She stopped to listen more closely, to see if she could hear something new through the wind. A pure singing note rose, high and sustained, then another, in a kind of courtly diction. ¶ Wolves” (68).

The author’s Driving on the Rim was published in 2010.
Chris Steele-Perkins, Photographer
Magnum Photos

Grant Cornett

34. August 26, 2013, Yu Hua, “Victory”: Lin Hong discovers that her husband Li Hanlin has been seeing another woman (ostensibly without sex), and sets out to punish both of them. ¶ However, Li Hanlin rather turns the tables by acquiescing to all of Lin Hong’s demands and punishments: sleeping on the sofa, eating out instead of expecting her to cook for him, not watching the TV, sleeping in a chair (instead of their bed) when she decides to sleep on “his” couch. Finally, Li Hanlin says he can no longer endure the situation and asks for a divorce. Lin Hong is shocked but agrees. On the way to the courthouse, they stop at a café where they’d gone after registering for their wedding. One of fiction’s coincidences: the “other woman” happens to be there and Lin Hong figures it out. Her “victory” occurs when she convinces Li Hanlin to kiss her quite passionately in front of the other woman. ¶ The ending allows both parties to save face. Lin Hong has punished the woman and exacted a promise of fidelity from Li Hanlin, calls him back from the cold. Hua’s Boy in the Twilight: Stories of the Hidden China comes out this month.
Grant Cornett, Photographer.

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35. September 2, 2013, Robert Coover, “The Colonel’s Daughter”: The Colonel of an unstated country’s army is planning a coup to remove the current President from office, and he engages his voluptuous daughter to serve refreshments to his fellow conspirators. ¶ Coover, interestingly enough, passes the point of view from conspirator to conspirator—none of them a very savory personage. It is a shrewd move because otherwise the reader might not be aware of the betrayal that is brewing.

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“The Colonel himself, who seems increasingly removed from the events around him, as if, with a placid smile, communing with the beyond, would, should things go wrong (does he hear a whimper? A slap?), undoubtedly disavow his involvement and betray his own conspiracy” (65).

Yes, deftly Coover causes the Colonel to leave the room, and when he returns he is executed. When his daughter enters, she’s wearing black, so is the President, who publicly eulogizes his targeted assassin in a positive light. The chronology seems to be a bit skewed here, with her entering in black before the execution, or is this my misreading?

“But we are characters who do not exist, in a story composed by no one from nothing. Can anything be more pitiable? No wonder we all are grieving” (65).

Indeed. In spite of the great strength of this story—the daughter’s actions and apparel providing the reader with a metaphoric blueprint of the betrayal—a lack of specifics about nationality seems to strip the story of a certain flavor, as if a chef has omitted oregano from the lasagne. Ultimately, the Colonel is deceived by one of his conspirators, just as he has predicted in the beginning.
Coover’s The Brunist Day of Wrath is recently out from Dzanc Books.
Scott McKowen, Illustrator

Eric Ogden

36. September 23, 2013, Tessa Hadley, “Bad Dreams”: A nine-year-old girl wakes from dreaming and on a whim upsets the living room furniture of her parents’ basement Victorian flat. She has read and re-read a certain book so many times that she may conflate it with her "daytime" life.

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“Perhaps it would be funny when her parents saw it in the morning. At any rate, nothing--nothing—would ever make her tell them that she’d done it. They would never know, and that was funny, too” (103).

The point of view shifts to the mother who rises to find the mess in the living room. She believes it is her husband’s doing, a kind of rebelliousness against her domestication.

“Nothing--nothing—would ever make her acknowledge what he’d done, or the message he’d left for her, although when he saw the room restored to its rightful order, he would know that she knew” (105).

The very last section of the story pulls back as the camera would do in a film. A young wife fries bacon for her husband. The child is once again interested in reading her book, the very thing that may have set her mischievous mind to working.

“The child was insistent, though, that she needed to start reading it all over again, from the beginning. Her mother took the book away and chivvied her along” (105).

Hadley employs POV effectively in her writing, as she does charmingly in 2012’s “An Abduction” (six characters)—a writer’s tool that is often ignored or forgotten. By shifting the POV twice, Hadley moves the narrative to one about a little girl’s dreams to one with much wider implications: about the married relationship of a young couple, their subterranean life in an old Victorian house in England.
Hadley’s novel Clever Girl will be out early in 2014.
Eric Ogden, Photographer

Clang

37. October 14, 2013, Lara Vapnyar, “Katania”: Two young girls in 1970s Soviet Russia become friends until they fight over a male doll with a broken leg. ¶ The story seems to do so many things at once. First, it makes us witness to a place most of us have never been before: the physical and cultural poverty of the USSR. Yet there exists a richness to the inventive nature of the girls’ play, the same inventiveness that allows them to survive their poverty. Second, we are also invited to enter the world of these girls, with their broken or maimed or otherwise incomplete dolls. ¶ As adults who meet later in America, via Facebook, one woman seems to have matured. She smiles to herself when the other woman proudly shows off her large house in the Berkshires, photos of her beautiful family, including a handsome husband. Katya doesn’t actually get to meet Tania’s husband, but she watches from her car has he emerges from his, a fine physical specimen except for the fact that one leg seems defective—like the male doll, over which they had fought as girls so long before. Vapnyar has determined a fine, O. Henry sort of irony that is almost as satisfying as a headful of hair and a watch fob. Vapnyar’s The Scent of Pine is out in 2014.
Clang, Photographer
Trunk Archive

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Bryan Adams

38. October 21, 2013, Alice Munro, “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”: Grant is forced to place his wife Fiona in an institution to treat her apparent dementia. ¶ Having read this wonderful story at least three times (first published in the magazine on December 27, 1999), not to mention viewing the film based on it (a fine performance by Julie Christie as Fiona in Away from Her), I stand with my opinion that, while this is a distinguished story by a revered writer, publishing it a second time aces another writer out of one of the fifty-one spots in the magazine in 2013. It might have been more desirable to publish a new Munro story honoring her recent Nobel status. Munro’s Too Much Happiness  was published in 2009.
Bryan Adams, Photographer

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Grant Cornett

39. November 4, 2013, Thomas McGuane, “Weight Watchers”: An older man who refuses to meet his wife’s demand that he lose weight travels to stay with his middle-aged son, a bachelor contractor. ¶ McGuane spares no detail with regard to building character—backstory galore—even minor personalities, and yet there are no first names for the primary characters or the son who narrates the story. His dry wit sets the tone, a way, I should think, of processing what bitterness might survive. On the one hand, he claims to hold no grudge against his embattled parents though each in his or her own way has abused him through their dysfunction. Yet at the very end, the son tips his philosophical hand:

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“I’ve always enjoyed the idea of nonexistence. I view pets with extraordinary suspicion: we need to stay out of their lives. I saw a woman fish a little dog out of her purse once, and it bothered me for a year. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with my ability to communicate: I have a cell phone, but I only use it to call out” (99).

By accepting no incoming information, the son maintains a very careful control over his life—one that is neither happy or un, just hermetically sealed. McGuane’s Driving on the Rim was published in 2010. 
Grant Cornett, Photographer

Merlin

40. November 11, 2013, Chinelo Okparanta, “Benji”: Benji, a Nigerian man of forty-two, short in stature but wealthy and an astute business man, becomes involved with Alare, an older married woman. ¶ The story slowly reveals via carefully laid clues that Benji has been taken for a lot of money by Alare and his gardener, Godwin, no less! What’s most remarkable about this narrative may be the ending. Okparanta avoids the most satisfying solution in Western literature, that of revenge. Instead, Benji decides that his days shall continue as before the one on which his mother had introduced him to Alare.

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“He would walk around to the front door. He would take a seat at the mahogany table. The house girls would place his breakfast before him, and he would eat it zestfully, the same way he always ate it, the way he would have eaten it if today were just another ordinary day” (71).

There is no emotional need for retribution on Benji’s part. And yet this ending could also be very un-African, as well, considering all the plots of hatred and revenge that have been taken out by one tribe on another. Perhaps it is the author’s way of making peace in the midst of all the continent’s turmoil, her way of creating an ending that is satisfying on its own merit. Benji has no need for Alare before he meets her; he has no need of her after. Okparanta’s Happiness, Like Water was published in 2013.
Merlin, Illustrato

Jens Mortensen

41. November 18, 2013, Jeffrey Eugenides, “Find the Bad Guy”: Charlie D, sixty-year-old Houstonian (by way of Michigan) marries Johanna, a German woman, in a “green-card” marriage that lasts until it can no longer bear the weight of failure. ¶ Eugenides can do very little wrong, although some of his Texas stuff is a bit out of kilter. The Lübeck/Lubbock joke (69) gets old to those of us who actually live in one of those places, and I don’t think any home in Houston has a “boiler,” (77) as most houses are equipped with forced-air central heating/cooling. After all, winter in Houston is not a real season, more like a reprieve. ¶ Throughout the story Eugenides employs a number of tropes: 1) In couples therapy, Charlie D and Johanna discover that Finding the Bad Guy is a game most couples play: You left the cap off the toothpaste; you left the front door wide open. Again.

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“What you have to realize, as a couple, is that there is no bad guy. You can’t win an argument when you’re married. Because if you win, your spouse loses, and resents losing, and then you lose, too, pretty much” (72).

2) Another trope is Charlie's honesty, the kind that hurts, cuts through all the crap, the kind a reader finds hard to forgive, like Charlie’s abusing the family dog, porking the live-in babysitter who’s nineteen. But such honesty also endears the reader to Charlie D. 3) The author also employs strong metaphors: Ötzi, the Ice Man discovered in Switzerland, for example.

“That’s what Johanna and I were doing, going to marital therapy. We were living through an Ice Age, armed with bows and arrows. We had wounds from previous skirmishes. All we had if we got sick were some medicinal herbs. There’s a flint arrowhead lodged in my left shoulder. Ouch. But we had this ember box with us, and if we could just get it somewhere—I don't know, a cave, or a stand of pines—we could use this ember to reignite the fire of our love” (74).

Wow. But even Charles D. realizes the marriage has been a sham in spite of all that he admires and loves about Johanna. If you fake marry someone, what can you really expect to happen in the end? And what keeps couples together? Charlie D recommends the following:

“It’s just checking in with each other. Doing little kindnesses for each other. At breakfast, you pass the jam. Or, on a trip to New York City, you hold hands for a second in a smelly subway elevator. You ask ‘How was your day’ and pretend to care. Stuff like that really works” (76)

Can we believe him? Eugenides’s most recent novel, The Marriage Plot, was published in 2011.
Jens Mortensen, Photographer

Eric Ogden

42. November 25, 2013, Lionel Shriver, “Kilifi Creek”: A young American woman, Liani, invites herself to visit friends of friends of friends in Kenya, nearly dies during a swim in Kilifi Creek that feeds into the Indian Ocean, and yet fails to learn what should be the most important lesson of her life. ¶ The entire story is contingent on Liana’s close call with death. Before straying too far from the shore, before cutting her foot open on a rock, before crawling back to her hosts’ house in the dark—Liana is one way. Selfish. Overconfident. Arrogant. After the incident she seems changed.

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“It was funny how when some little nothing went down you played it for all it was worth, but when a truly momentous occurrence shifted the tectonic plates in your mind you kept your mouth shut” (115-6).

Liana is smaller. Quieter. More circumspect. ¶ The story jumps to when Liana is thirty-seven. She is in marketing in New York City. She is a runner. When the locale of the story shifts to an evening party on the roof of her stylish apartment, your stomach flops from the vertigo. You know what is about to happen. And a certain part of your psyche is not disappointed. Which part it is may be difficult to determine: the part that is watching yourself go over the edge or the part that is about to hit rock bottom. Shriver’s Big Brother came out in 2013.
Eric Ogden, Photographer
Trunk Archive

Jamie Kripke

43. December 9, 2013, Rivka Galchen, “The Late Novels of Gene Hackman” (Galchen's second story this year): J takes Q, her late father’s wife, on a trip to Key West to speak at a writers conference. There J does a poor job of presenting and perhaps a poor job of presenting herself to the group of mostly older writers. ¶ Using initials in place of characters’ names creates a secret, a distance. I know; I’ve done it in my own work. I wonder why Galchen does it here. If it is to create a gulf between the story and the reader, perhaps she does so to reflect the impersonal way society treats older people, as if they are invisible—no longer viable, incapable of being a proper person. ¶ The group discusses Gene Hackman—not present at the conference; he lives one island away—repeating the news, quite impersonally, that he was hit by a truck but that even at eighty-one he is doing fine. He’s co-written almost four novels, the last one aptly titled Justice for None. The story contains some one-line zingers, but I don't think this is a particularly "happy" story. Galchen (see link attached to photo) states that she modeled this after a Roberto Bolaño story, one I have not read. Her short-story collection American Innovations will be out in May.
Jamie Kripke, Photographer
Awesome photographs!

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James Casebere, John Brownjohn

44. December 16, 2013, Steven Millhauser,  “Coming Soon”: Levinson, a forty-two-year-old man, moves from the city to a nameless suburb, where constant change is so ubiquitous that he ultimately doesn’t know where he lives. ¶ Seems that Millhauser has delivered a small satire of suburban progress. The adage—the more things change, the more they stay the same—seems true even if you say it backwards. Levinson has left the city to experience small-town life, its familiarities, its friendliness. But then, as in the city, things begin to change, ostensibly overnight. His favorite shops disappear and he must find new ones. At the end—we’ve all been there—he enters a six-line freeway he never knew was there until it’s too late. And we have the feeling he’ll never find his way home again. It is a bitter irony, Millhauser gets the taste just about right, of capitalism gone way wrong. Capitalists, conservative by nature, create much that is apparently new, but underneath all the glitz, all is the same. Coming soon to a town that used to be yours. Millhauser’s We Others: New and Selected Stories was published in 2011.
James Casebere, Photographer
John Brownjohn, Design

ON FRIDAY READ "The Stories I Least Liked and Why"

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