New Yorker stories —
Childcare by Lorrie Moore is hands down the best New Yorker story I’ve read this year. It’s consistently surprisingly, deft and clever in its dialogue, descriptions and characterizations, and just damn fun to read. I actually found myself dreading reaching the end, knowing that no matter when it happened it would be too soon. [...]
Despite its lackluster title, Salman Rushdie’s In the South ends up being a satisfying little exercise with enough frills to keep me interested. The story centers around two senescent Indian neighbors who have little to do except wait around for the end together, having outlasted most of their immediate family members. Their sobriquets [...]
So I’m perusing the fiction page on the New Yorker website looking for my next story to read when I realize that T. Coraghessan Boyle has not one, not two, but three of the most recent 25 stories listed. Really, New Yorker? Really??? Not only do you give John Updike two stories, but Coraghessan gets [...]
Alice Munro’s latest story in the New Yorker is called Deep-Holes. You can read it here.
To me the sheer scope of this piece ends up getting in its own way. The story spans at least a couple decades, and its characters (a family with three children) pass through time so quickly that it’s difficult to [...]
All I can say is WOW – leave it to a frakkin’ legend like Alice Munro to screw my head back on about New Yorker fiction. If reading the weekly New Yorker story is like a dubious session of panning for gold, reading Free Radicals by Alice Munro is like finding a big fat [...]
I’m sure expectations for some sort of profound revelation are building with each passing day, but for now I’d just like to try and get back into an executional groove with this blog so I’m going to start out with one of our recurring features and a promise to make it more recurring than history [...]
Paul Theroux’s Mr. Bones is a brilliant study of family dynamics. The narrator describes his father as a heartbreakingly kind milquetoast with a dead-end life and an unappeasable wife. When the father turns to a second life as a blackface performer in a minstrel show, the narrator’s queasiness is more than just palpable – it’s [...]
Luda and Milena seems like an old trifle of a story. It’s about two old Russian women bent on seducing a man in their ESL class by cooking progressively more and more elaborate dishes to win his stomach and heart. I wish I could say there’s more to this, but that’s pretty much [...]
So I checked out the Summer Fiction issue of the New Yorker from the library, which will hopefully lead to more New Yorker stories being read. They’ve had a pretty decent lineup in the past few weeks (go here to check it out) but I haven’t found the time to stay caught up. [...]
