Category: New Yorker Recycling Project

Confessions of a Juggler

February 14 & 21, 2011: Confessions of a Juggler by Tina Fey

“How do you juggle it all?” people constantly ask me, with an accusatory look in their eyes. “You’re screwing it all up, aren’t you?” their eyes say.

Tina Fey’s reflections on juggling motherhood and career are surprisingly warm, and (not surprisingly) funny. If that whole “30 Rock” gig falls through, I hope she starts writing the “Shouts & Murmurs” column.

I was looking forward to Mary Gaitskill’s story in this issue, “The Other Place.” And though it was perfectly written, as you would expect, and the story of the would-be-killer on whom the tables are painfully turned was interesting, in the end it felt more than a little gratuitous. I would expect that if a New Yorker story takes on a chestnut like “even a mild-mannered father who teaches his son to fly fish in the back yard could be a serial killer at heart,” it would be done in a way that pushes the envelope or adds a new spark to the cold embers of the trope. Alas, “The Other Place” does neither.

Axis

January 31, 2011: Axis by Alice Munro

AxisFortunately, Grace and Avie were both attractive. Grace was fair and stately, Avie red-haired, less voluptuous, lively, and challenging. Male members of both their families had joked that they ought to be able to nab somebody.

Anton Chekhov is alive and well and living in Canada. “Axis” is a miniature novel, compressing four lives into a few pages and a handful of critical moments; this is short fiction at its best.

New Yorker Recycling Project: another roundup

I’m clearing out some more of the stack of New Yorkers that always seem to get way ahead of me, and in the spirit of The New Yorkerest noting the best pieces. If you should happen to run into one of these issues in a waiting room, these are the can’t-miss stories and articles.

March 7, 2011

Backbone by David Foster Wallace

Nor was it ever established precisely why this boy had devoted himself to the goal of being able to press his lips to every square inch of his own body. It is not clear even that he conceived of the goal as an “achievement” in any conventional sense.

Wallace mixes historical discussions of contortionists, yogis, and stigmatists with the story of a young boy who is methodically perfecting his flexibility so he can kiss each part of his body. Having kissed it once, he moves on to the next spot, with grueling focus. As an aside, one wonders if David Foster Wallace will be the American answer to Roberto Bolaño, with a torrent of posthumous publications.

Story’s End by Meghan O’Rourke

Yet the story of Orpheus, it occurs to me, is not just about the desire of the living to resuscitate the dead but about the ways in which the dead drag us along into their shadowy realm because we cannot let them go.

A touching, brief memoir about stories, reading, lakes, and death.

February 28, 2011

Paranoia by Said Sayrafiezadeh

When April arrived, it started to get warm and everyone said that the war was definitely going to happen soon and there was nothing anybody could do to stop it.

A bleak, uneasy story about the nervousness–personal and political–of the contemporary world.

A Widow’s Story

Forever after, you will recognize those places–previously invisible, indiscernible–where memory pools accumulate. All the waiting areas of hospitals, hospital rooms, and, in particular, those regions of the hospital reserved for the very ill: Telemetry, Intensive Care. You will not wish to return to these places, where memory pools lie underfoot, as treacherous as acid.

A Widow’s Story by Joyce Carol Oates, New Yorker December 13, 2010

I have to admit, I’m not a huge Joyce Carol Oates fan. Maybe it’s the sheer volume of her output, or the way she seems to insist on having her say on the latest trend (a couple years ago she had a story in the Atlantic’s fiction issue that was a pale shadow of Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me Go” that simply left me cold). “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” is one of the best American short stories ever, but I’ve always chalked that up to the adage that a stopped clock is right twice a day.

But this piece about her husband’s death is beautiful, painful, and devastating. Told in a first-person present voice, it is both immediate and reflective. She captures perfectly the timelessness of the hospital waiting room, the abruptness of a medical emergency, and the strange and cold end of a life, where the existential and the practical crash into each other.

It’s enough to make me consider giving her another chance.

Publish or Perish

“We have three behemoths now competing,” the C.E.O. of one house said. “So one of them can’t force us to do anything unless the others go along.”

The big piece in the April 26 New Yorker (partly because E.L. Doctorow’s story is so lousy) is Ken Auletta’s inside look at the e-book wars being played out between Amazon, Apple, and the big publishing houses (with Google sitting on the sidelines, waiting to pounce later this year). With the iPad for leverage, Macmillan and other publishers went up against Amazon’s e-book pricing model and forced concessions that may turn out to be in the publishers’ favor in the short term.

The machinations on the publishing and distribution business are interesting, I suppose, but I’m not convinced that a deal with the devil (and really, both Amazon and Apple, with their histories of arbitrary disappearances and electronic memory holes, have more than a tinge of the diabolical) is going to save the publishing world in a post-literate society. At best, they’ll sqeeze a few more pennies per e-book out of their distributors until the dwindling market for their product evaporates.

My modest proposal to the publishing industry would be to focus on compelling products instead of tactical e-book deals. Stop paying ridiculous advances for celebrity books that end up on the remainder tables a few weeks after publication; quit following the “me too!” trends (vampires this week, zombies next, with periodic eruptions of DaVince Code knock-offs); forget about the movie, game, and t-shirt tie ins. Instead, pay small advances and generous royalties to writers who can stay the course for a career; keep the back list alive (this was the great service that Amazon offered the publishers in the early days of the web) with creative cross-selling; and embrace the niche. The population of book buyers may never again be a mass audience the way movie, video game, and device app buyers are now; the Golden Age of Literacy, which existed from maybe 1860 to 1950, may well turn out to have been a weirdly aberrant historical blip.

The successful small presses–Graywolf and Soft Skull come immediately to mind–are making a go of it with a small but solid catalog of writing that will outlast the trendiest trends and find new readers for years to come. And that, not the latest distribution deal with Apple, Amazon, or Google, is where the hope of literacy lies. Haggling over a dollar or two on e-book prices is like trying to cut a good deal on deck chairs while the Titanic sinks.

Free Fruit for Young Widows

He made it through the camps. He walks, he breathes, and he was very close to making it out of Europe alive. But they killed him. After the war, we still lost people. They killed what was left of him in the end.

Nathan Englander’s Free Fruit for Young Widows is more parable than story, sketching two acts of brutal self-preservation–one at the end of World War II, one during the Suez Crisis–and the very different reactions of two men. The characters, though, are more fully realized than is typical of a parable, and the result is a haunting story that brings abstract moral arguments down to concrete human terms.

Englander’s story would be memorable in any context, but especially so after a series of New Yorker stories that haven’t lived up to the standards of the magazine. (Was anyone else deeply disappointed by Doctorow’s Edgemont Drive, which was stilted, predictable, and not up to the standards of an undergraduate writing class? Were all the fiction editors on vacation that week?) I hope it’s an idicator of a better summer ahead.

Rat Beach


For while the warrior in me–the self-consciously ballsy kid who’d joined the Marines for the glamour and the danger–lamented not having seen action, there was another, more sensible part of myself that felt immense relief at this reprieve. And reprieve it was. For all of us knew that the invasion of Japan was in the offing, and that we’d be involved in no more feints or diversions. We’d be in the vanguard.

William Styron’s Rat Beach is a look inside the thoughts and emotions of a young Marine lieutenant waiting on Saipan in the summer of 1945 for the invasion of Japan. It captures the unrelenting boredom and terror of war, as he and his comrades wait for what they expect to be “the toughest fight in the history of the Marines.”

Styron’s narrator is a bookish young officer, carrying a battered “Pocket Book of Verse” and fearful of failing his men in the invasion. Following a presentation by Navy commanders promising that the beaches of Japan will be softened by the big guns before the landing, his commanding officer gives a combination St. Crispin’s Day speech and harsh reality check, letting them know that the invasion of Japan will be deadly:

The landing beaches will be as impregnable as any such beaches can be made. They’ll have guns zeroed in to blow us apart. But we will have to go in and take that beachhead, even if it means that many of us won’t be coming back.

Midnight in Dostoevsky

I placed the book on a table and opened it and then leaned down into the splayed pages, reading and breathing. We seemed to assimilate each other, the characters and I, and when I raised my head I had to tell myself where I was.

Don DeLillo’s Midnight in Dostoevsky is a nervous parable of obsession, more Kafka than Dostoevsky in its unease. It follows two college students in their efforts to construct a narrative around Ilgauskus, their mysterious Logic professor, and a nameless old man they’ve seen on winter walks around town. They are interested in building a consistent story, filled with details, that links the old man and the professor, and are resistent to outside details that threaten their crystalline tale. The world and its facts are a threat to their constructed system of context and meaning.

Jill Lepore’s essay on the politics of death, and the unfortunate convergence of medical technology, overheated rhetoric about Nazis, and the medicalization of life’s inevitable end, was also a highlight of the November 30 2009 New Yorker. But DeLillo’s anxious fable is the piece that sticks with me.

Service

Platon’s haunting portfolio of portraits of sodliers and their families stood out from the September 29 2008 issue of the New Yorker. High-contrast, grainy, and haunting, they capture the trepidation of soldiers, sailors, and Marines preparing to deploy, and the grief of the families of the fallen. The photograph of Elsheba Khan at the grave of her son, Specialist Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, is especially heartrending, and out to be on the desk of everyone in Washington who has anything to do with the prosecution of our wars.

Hearth Surgery

For a double issue, the December 21-28 2009 issue of the New Yorker is surprisingly thin on memorable articles. I was looking forward to Helen Simpson’s “Diary of an Interesting Year,” on the strength of other stories of hers I’ve read, but I found her grim little post-apocalyptic tale neither as dark and brooding as “The Road” nor as high-concept as “Children of Men” (the original P..D. James novel, not the violent gore-fest movie). The only piece that stuck with me was Burkhard Bilger’s “Hearth Surgery, about a group of inventers and iconoclasts who are trying to solve poverty and global warming by designing high-efficiency stoves for the Third World. I’ve had a little (very unsuccessful) experience with building solar ovens with the Cub Scouts, so I took away a few pointers for future attempts at more interesting ways to grill our hot dogs.

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