X-Posts on New Yorker Fiction

I've posted reviews on Emdashes of a fair amount of recent fiction from The New Yorker that I've been forgetting to cross-post here. So tonight, I'm making up for it. Here's reviews of:

• Steven Polansky's "Leg," from January 24, 1994
• Yoko Ogawa's "A Cafeteria in the Evening and a Pool in the Rain," from 2004
• Three recent New Yorker stories by Gail Hareven (trans. Yaacov Jeffrey Green), Martínez (trans. Alberto Manguel), and Chris Adrian.
• Three slightly more recent New Yorker stories by J.G. Ballard, Craig Raine, and Colm Tóibín.

Ian McEwan on Not Being Understood by a Reader

Whereas in Black Dogs, the intellectual war is between equals, Joe Rose's logical mind clearly shows up that of his girlfriend, Clarissa [in the novel Enduring Love]. A Romantic scholar, she doubts his evidence that he is being stalked, and nearly ends up dead. McEwan remebers that not every reader accepted the point: "Poor Greg [McEwan's son] had to study Enduring Love in school. He had a female teacher. And he had to write an essay: Who was the moral center of the book? And I said to Greg, 'Well, I think Clarissa's got everything wrong.' He got a D. The teacher didn't care what I thought. She thought that Joe was too 'male' in his thinking. Well. I mean, I only wrote the damn thing."

--from the February 23, 2009 issue of The New Yorker, Daniel Zalewski's, "The Background Hum."

Judith Thurman on People You Meet Playing Online Scrabble

I have probably met more interesting strangers playing online Scrabble than I have in a lifetime of travel to exotic places. A Ghanaian taxi-driver from Brooklyn invited me to Prospect Park, where his Scrabble club held weekend tournaments. A tattoo artist in Alberta surprised me, between plays, with her knowledge of Gerard Manley Hopkins. An Oxford don beat me soundly, but so did a used-car salesman. I have played Aussies and New Zealanders (Scrabble is popular in the antipodes), an impertinent prodigy who confessed to being eleven, a cardsharp in Las Vegas, a lawyer in Bangalore who traded places with his wife for the endgame ("She's the family closer," he said), a corgi breeder, and a Jane Austen fan ("elizabennet") who added a few words that Jane never used -- "feeb," "ottar," "vas," and "zineb" -- to my vocabulary.

--p. 29 of Judith Thurman's January 19, 2009 New Yorker article, "Spreading the Word."

A.J. Liebling on Partying Like its 1952

It was a sixteen-story cooperative building with two apartments on each floor, and the woman just above us, with whom our landlord had left the key, said it was as friendly as an old-time boarding house. "All the apartments are laid out just alike," she told us, "and that makes it homey, because no matter whose apartment you're in, you know where everything is. Last New Year's Eve, eleven of us got together and gave a party in all our eleven apartments, one above the other. One apartment was South American, with a rumba band, and another was Wild West, with a square-dance caller, and another French, with an accordionist, and you just took the elevator from one to another, and lay where you fell."

--From a profile of Chicago by A.J. Liebling in the January 12, 1952 issue of The New Yorker, called "Second City."

Hilton Als on Jean Stafford

Following closely on the heels of my earlier Emdashes post singing the praises of Jean Stafford's "In the Zoo," The New Yorker featured a story of hers in May's fiction podcast with Hilton Als. It wasn't one of her stronger stories, in my opinion, though The New Yorker seems to like it, since they not only published it the first time, but they reprinted an excerpt in the June 27, 1994 issue, and now feature it on a podcast. De gustibus non est disputandum.

Shirley Hazzard - When Transit of Venus Was Young

Catching up with my Emdashes posts: I've commented before now on how much I enjoyed re-reading Shirley Hazzard's Transit of Venus. More recently, over on on Emdashes I performed a detailed review of four of Hazzard's stories from The New Yorker which later made up a good chunk of Transit. If I haven't convinced to read it yet, I hope this will do it.

Lorrie Moore, Read by Louise Erdrich

Catching up with my Emdashes posts: I strongly recommend that you check out the fiction podcast. In particular, I can't say enough good things about Louise Erdrich's reading of Lorrie Moore's story, "Dance in America." Phor phun, phollow the link!