Category: New Yorker 2009

June 16, 2009

>The New Yorker: "The Tiger’s Wife" by Téa Obreht

>More from the Summer Fiction Issue. Congratulations to Téa Obreht, a recent MFA grad, for placing this fiction in The New Yorker. It seemed…
June 11, 2009

>The New Yorker: "Good Neighbors" by Jonathan Franzen

>The Franzen story is the main event in the Summer Fiction issue, and it’s typical, breathless Franzen, filled with wonderful long sentences and lists…
May 31, 2009

>The New Yorker: "Love Affair with Secondaries" by Craig Raine

>I tell writing students that stories about adultery and stories about cancer are tired and done to death, and that stories about adultery AND…
May 22, 2009

>The New Yorker: "Ava’s Apartment" by Jonathan Lethem

>Although it isn’t labeled a short story–The New Yorker doesn’t seem to do that–neither is this “fiction” by Jonathan Lethem labeled a novel excerpt,…
May 15, 2009

>The New Yorker: "In the South" by Salman Rushdie

>This is a terrific story, possibly my favorite of the year so far. Senior and Junior are two old men with the same name…
May 9, 2009

>The New Yorker: "The Autobiography of J.G.B." by J.G. Ballard

>More allegory? I have not read much J.G. Ballard, who died last month, so I don’t know how typical this is for him. Perhaps…
May 1, 2009

>The New Yorker: "The Slows" by Gail Hareven

>Kicking off Short Story Month! It takes a little while to figure out what’s going on here because the narrative voice sounds normal and…
April 23, 2009

>The New Yorker: "Vast Hell" by Guillermo Martínez

>Oooh, a nice twist here, and so I’ll try not to reveal too much of the plot. The narrator works in the grocery store…
April 21, 2009

>The New Yorker: "A Tiny Feast" by Chris Adrian

>I hate cancer stories. There are too many of them and it is too easy to make them overly sentimental and melodramatic. But this…
April 11, 2009

>The New Yorker: "The Color of Shadows" by Colm Toibin

>This is a sneaky little story. Not much is happening, although there are some questions in the back of the reader’s mind, like—where’s the…
%d bloggers like this: