New Yorker Fiction 2012

This year the New Yorker published 50 pieces of fiction. I read 34 of them. 

Here were my eight favorites:

A Brief Encounter with the Enemy (Jan. 16), by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh. 

Sayrafiezadeh is becoming one of my new favorite writers. A previous story of his, "Paranoia," was on my list last year. This one, with its titular echo of Flannery O'Connor, was a disturbing war story that felt utterly true despite its obvious inventedness.

A Prairie Girl (Feb. 27) and The Casserole (Sep. 10), by Thomas McGuane

In the past twelve years, McGuane has been among the ten most frequently published writers of fiction in the New Yorker. Unfortunately, I typically find his work uninteresting. But this year he had two stories in the magazine that I thought were quite good. "A Prairie Girl" was a piquant tale of a determined heroine unbowed by conscience or sentiment; "The Casserole" a very brief story with a great ending.

The Proxy Marriage (May 21), by Maile Meloy 

I'm planning on teaching some stories from Maile Meloy's most recent story collection this coming semester. I'm tempted to bring in this story as well—one of the sweetest I've ever read in the magazine.

An Abduction (July 9), by Tessa Hadley 

Over the past twelve years, only Alice Munro has had more fiction published in the New Yorker than Tessa Hadley. Whereas I love Munro (a frequent flier on my year-end lists of favorites, though not this year), I find Hadley to be spottier. Sometimes I skip her stories; sometimes I like them a lot. This particular story was rather Munrovian, now that I think about it: a story of a young woman put into a situation in which she behaved differently than she would have expected, with an ending that leaps far into her future and reflects back on the episode's significance.

The Third-Born (Sep. 24), by Mohsin Hamid 

Told in the second person, this piece is an excerpt from a forthcoming novel called How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, a book I definitely want to read. The story grippingly puts us into a world of poverty and desperation.

The Semplica-Girl Diaries (Oct. 15), by George Saunders 

Saunders is always on my year-end lists, but this story, I think, is one of his best of all time, a chilling tale of parenting, materialism, and today's economy.

Ox Mountain Death Song (Oct. 29), by Kevin Barry 

This tale of crime and punishment won me over with its narrative voice, tinged with Irish vernacular.

The sixteen stories I skipped were mostly by writers that I've grown tired of. Occasionally I would start a story and find it so uninteresting that I wouldn't finish it. For some reason I didn't read any of the fiction in the Science Fiction issue. I read every story published from August through December, and half of the ones published from January to July.

Did I miss any stories that you thought were great? Let me know. 

A Year in Reading

This year has not been a very productive one for me as a writer (as witnessed by the relative paucity of posts to this blog), but it has been productive as far as reading goes. And I suppose the two trends go hand-in-hand: the more you read, the less time you have to write, and also, at some level, the less drive you feel to write. There's so much that's already been written—does the world really need one more voice clamoring for attention?  

Last Christmas break, I got embroiled in William Faulkner’s Collected Stories, which I ended up reading about three-quarters of over the course of the year, along with a number of Faulkner novels: The Hamlet, If I Forget Thee Jerusalam (aka The Wild Palms), Light in August (which I re-read with a couple colleagues while one of them taught it to his juniors), and Absalom, Absalom!, which I read and discussed with a group of my colleagues over the summer. My reading of Faulkner inspired a couple blog posts about Faulkner and race, which you can read here and here.

I read Mary Doria Russell’s fantastic pair of science-fiction classics, The Sparrow and Children of God, recommended to me by a colleague and friend. I also read two books by the great cartoonist Alison Bechdel, The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For and Are You My Mother?

I read a couple books about literary heroes of mine—Sean Wilentz’s Bob Dylan in America and D. T. Max’s biography of David Foster Wallace, Every Ghost Story is a Love Story—along with a number of memoirs by writers and musicians: Dylan’s own Chronicles, Volume One; Gil Scott-Heron’s The Last Holiday; Haki Madhubuti’s YellowBlack (recommended to me by a reader of this blog in response to one of my Faulkner posts); Saïd Sayrafiezadeh’s gripping When Skateboards Will Be Free; and Jay-Z’s Decoded, which came in handy when I taught hip-hop in the final week of my senior African American Voices class.

I’ve long been interested in residential segregation and the fate of the American city, and this year I read a number of books that added to my understand of those issues: Kenneth Jackson’s classic Crabgrass Frontier; Stephen Grant Meyer’s As Long as They Don’t Move Next Door; Beryl Satter’s amazingly good Family Properties; two plays, both overrated, in my opinion: Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun and its more recent companion piece, Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park; Jeffrey Copeland’s Olivia’s Story, a novel about St. Louis and the Shelley v. Kraemer case; and, lastly, a series of very interesting guidebooks by local historian John A. Wright: Discovering African-American St. Louis; Kinloch; The Ville; St. Louis: Disappearing African American Communities; and African Americans in Downtown St. Louis.

In addition to segregation in housing, I also read about mass incarceration, in Michelle Alexander’s troubling and informative The New Jim Crow. I read Touré’s Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness? I read Nigger and Sellout, both by Randall Kennedy, whose prose's clarity I greatly admire; and a fascinating work of history and political theory, Robert C. Smith’s Conservatism and Racism, and Why in America They are the Same.

As for other African Americana, I read Eddy Harris’s travelogue South of Haunted Dreams  and Arnold Rampersad’s Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry. In search of some material to use in class, I dipped into The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. I also read a gripping account of King’s assassination and its aftermath, Hampton Sides’s Hellhound on His Trail.

I read a number of collections of short stories: Knockemstiff, Donald Ray Pollock’s updating of Sherwood Anderson, brutal but not heartless; Tobias Wolff’s early, Chekhovian collection Back in the World; Alice Munro’s early collection Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You; Maile Meloy’s Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It, which I’m planning on teaching from this coming semester in my Reading and Writing Fiction class; James Alan McPherson’s groundbreaking Hue and Cry; along with some of the stories, including the brilliant title piece, in Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories.

Most recently, I read Peter Heller’s novel The Dog Stars, a post-apocalyptic tale, and Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, a devastating work of journalism by Christopher Hedges and Joe Sacco which at times put me in a rather apocalyptic mood.

Before this Christmas break is over, I’d like to read a couple more books, at least: Danielle Evans’s short story collection Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s memoir The Beautiful Struggle. And in the next couple of days I should be getting to the end of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, which I’ve been reading to my middle daughter, intending to finish up in time to watch the movie with the whole family over vacation.

Fiction Gives Us Everything

An intriguing passage from novelist Keith Ridgway that affirms something I believe about why what I do (teach kids to read literature) is useful: because it's practice for living:

[E]verything is fiction. When you tell yourself the story of your life, the story of your day, you edit and rewrite and weave a narrative out of a collection of random experiences and events. Your conversations are fiction. Your friends and loved ones—they are characters you have created. And your arguments with them are like meetings with an editor—please, they beseech you, you beseech them, rewrite me. You have a perception of the way things are, and you impose it on your memory, and in this way you think, in the same way that I think, that you are living something that is describable. When of course, what we actually live, what we actually experience—with our senses and our nerves—is a vast, absurd, beautiful, ridiculous chaos.

So I love hearing from people who have no time for fiction. Who read only biographies and popular science. I love hearing about the death of the novel. I love getting lectures about the triviality of fiction, the triviality of making things up. As if that wasn’t what all of us do, all day long, all life long. Fiction gives us everything. It gives us our memories, our understanding, our insight, our lives. We use it to invent ourselves and others. We use it to feel change and sadness and hope and love and to tell each other about ourselves. And we all, it turns out, know how to do it.

Into the Cities

For the past week I've been reading Kenneth T. Jackson's classic Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. This morning, I read a chapter called "The Drive-In Culture of Contemporary America," which was about how the automobile eventually changed the landscape of the nation, as highways and services adapted themselves to a suburban landscape geared toward the car. Led by Sears, Jackson notes, "Large-scale retailing, long associated with central business districts, began moving away from the urban cores between the world wars."


This was the beginning of what Greg Brown describes in his song "The Poet Game":


I watched my country turn into a coast-to-coast strip mall
And I cried out in a song.
If we can do all that in thirty years
Then please tell me you all
Why does good change take so long?


"The multiple-store shopping center with free, off-street parking represented the ultimate retail adaptation to the requirements of automobility," writes Jackson, citing St. Louis's own Hampton Village (1941) as one of the earliest such enterprises.


Near the end of his chapter, Jackson nods to the rise of the enclosed shopping mall. His award-winning book was published in 1985. Since then, of course, even some enclosed shopping malls have fallen upon hard times—think of Crestwood Mall, Jamestown Mall, and Northwest Plaza—superseded to some extent by the car-friendly big box stores.


Just now, though, I read an article in the New York Times that seems to suggest we may have turned a corner back toward the urban core, that the population is turning back to the cities and that big retailers are following.


... retailers are now willing to come into cities on the cities’ terms — with all the zoning headaches, high rents and odd architecture — because that is where the growth is. Most large American cities are growing faster than their suburbs for the first time in almost a century, according to a Brookings Institution analysis of census results released last month, largely because young adults are choosing urban apartment life. That population shift, along with Internet competition, have made the car-focused, big-box model less relevant.


Is this happening in St. Louis? The Brookings Institution report notes that St. Louis's decline slowed in 2010-11. In my own small bubble of friends and acquaintances and bloggers, it certainly feels like there's a real movement back toward the city.


The suburbs, to be sure, are not languishing. The big box stores' parking lots are still packed, the malls are still thriving (think of the Galleria, South County Mall, or West County Mall), and new subdivisions are still going up out in the hinterlands.


Still, it is nice, for those of us who love the city, to envision it as a unique, thriving place at the center of the sprawling megalopolis, a place where people can live, work, play, buy what they need, invest in and repair the glorious architecture and infrastructure of the past.

Broccoli

One of the most amusing responses to the Supreme Court's decision in the health care case last week was Adam Gopnik's. Part of the questioning in the case, you may recall, involved a hypothetical government mandate that Americans purchase broccoli.

Justice Ginsburg's opinion notes the ridiculousness of such a comparison, and Justice Roberts's also mentions the issue. Underlying all of the discussion, Gopnik notes, is the assumption that broccoli is disgusting. 

Gopnik thus comes to a remarkable conclusion: "nobody on the Supreme Court knows how to cook broccoli."

I've never been a huge fan of broccoli, though I'll choke it down from time to time. I was intrigued by Gopnik's bold assertion:

The truth is that broccoli should always be either roasted or pureed, in the French style, and is so delicious done either way that, if you tasted it, you would not just tolerate but demand government-mandated broccoli.

So I decided to use Gopnik's recipe for roasted broccoli last night: sliced red onion, curry, salt, and olive oil, at 450 degrees for twenty minutes.

The verdict?

I don't think I'd demand a government mandate, but it was still the best broccoli I've ever eaten.

For Ray Bradbury

A friend's lovely blog post about the death of Ray Bradbury caused me to stop and reflect on Bradbury's influence on my own reading life. It was Bradbury who first introduced me to the short story form in an extensive way. Since I first picked up a library copy of Bradbury's stories at the age of 14 or 15, the short story has become a big part of my life—I read stories obsessively, have a bookshelf devoted to collections of them, teach students to write them, and have written some of my own.

Truth be told, I haven't written much fiction in recent years, but here's a hundred-word story I wrote today in class after giving the hundred-word story assignment to my summer enrichment students. 

I think it has a bit of Bradbury in it.

Homecoming

Pierre von Staed was coming home, after 500 years.

In his spaceship, he had hibernated in a chamber that slowed his aging and woke him only for short periods to explore planets in deep space.

His mission: to seek life.

Pierre’s spaceship landed gently now. He woke from dreamless oblivion, opening his eyes upon a wasteland—hot gray skies, wrecked buildings.

He activated a device which could scan an entire planet for life. Within minutes it beeped: NO LIFE FORMS.

Pierre re-entered his ship and blasted off. His search would continue, but with a new goal: to find a home.

The Best Number of Kids

I found this Elizabeth Kolbert article about the ethics of having children interesting, especially this passage, since it concludes by affirming my own procreative fate:

According to Caplan, a professor at George Mason University, the major mistake that parents (or prospective parents) make is overvaluing the present. This is a common enough error. Workers in their twenties and thirties don’t save enough money for retirement because it seems such a long way off. Then their sixties roll around, and they wish they’d spent less on S.U.V.s and HDTVs and put more into their 401(k)s.

Couples, he argues, need to think not just about how many children they might want now, when they have better things to do than microwave Similac, but how many they will want to have around when they’re old and lonely and watching “The View.” Caplan recommends what he calls the “take the average” rule:

Suppose you’re thirty. Selfishly speaking, you conclude that the most pleasant number of children to have during your thirties is one. During your forties, your optimal number of kids will rise to two—you’ll have more free time as your kids assert their independence. By the time you’re in your fifties, all your kids will be busy with their own lives. At this stage, wouldn’t it be nice to have four kids who periodically drop by? Finally, once you pass sixty and prepare to retire, you’ll have ample free time to spend with your grandchildren. Five kids would be a good insurance policy against grandchildlessness. 

Caplan does the math and concludes that in this case “the best number of kids is three.”

A Year in Reading

This year I continued to focus a lot of my reading on books that I thought would help me teach my African American Voices class. Some of that reading included nonfiction books about the African American experience: Derrick Bell's Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism; Eugene Robinson's Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America; and Randall Kennedy's The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency. All three were gripping, addictive reads.

Shortly after I read Robinson's book, I saw him speak as part of the St. Louis Public Library's Black History Month program. His talk, on the the role of African Americans in the Civil War, led me to Stephanie McCurry's Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South. A more hardcore history book than I typically read, and somewhat tedious at times, the book nevertheless had some useful material that I ended up incorporating into a class on popular fiction of the post-Civil War era, in which I set up the stories of Charles W. Chesnutt as a corrective to the fantasies of white writers, exemplified by Joel Chandler Harris's "Story of the War."

I also read Gerald Early's new book A Level Playing Field: African American Athletes and the Republic of Sports, as well as Albert Murray's 1970 The Omni-Americans: Black Experience and American Culture. These were both stimulating books by first-class thinkers and writers. Less intellectually rigorous was Patrice Evans' Negropedia: The Assimilated Negro's Crash Course on the Modern Black Experience, a collection of glorified blog posts that made for entertaining bathrom reading but not much else.

Over the summer, I participated in another NEH Institute, this one on American culture as viewed through the lens of Motown and Jazz music in the years 1959-1975. It turned out to be quite fascinating, as well as a lot of work. Here's what I read; and here is what I wrote. Perhaps inspired by the course's emphasis on how music can be used to study culture, I ended up reading a number of books about black music: Gerald Early's One Nation Under a Groove: Motown and American Culture; Michael P. Jeffries' Thug Life: Race, Gender, and the Meaning of Hip-Hop; David Foster Wallace and Mark Costello's Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present; LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka's Blues People: Negro Music in White America; and Albert Murray's Stomping the Blues.

I also read several famous African American autobiographical narratives, all of which were great: Richard Wright's Black Boy; the Autobiography of Malcolm X (I taught the 1964 chapter in class); Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (which I plan to teach next year in place of Toni Morrison's Beloved); and Langston Hughes' The Big Sea (which I'm going to have the students read for summer reading).

Among all of this nonfiction about African Americans, I did read a few important pieces of fiction: Toni Cade Bambara's 1972 short story collection Gorilla, My Love; Wallace Thurman's Harlem Renaissance classic The Blacker the Berry; and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (the only piece of fiction Malcolm X read in prison).

Of course, the most unforgettable novel I read this year was Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, which I read along with a number of my colleagues. You can read the blog I kept about the experience here. Afterward, I enjoyed reading Isaiah Berlin's illuminating Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History.

Early on in the year I also read Sherman Alexie's rather uneven collection War Dances; over the summer I re-read Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men for my school's all-school summer reading project (which culminated this year in a great student production of the play); and I also plowed through David Foster Wallace's posthumous manuscript The Pale King, which, though it is nowhere close to a coherent, finished novel, still contains some pieces of writing which rank among DFW's best. What a loss that he is gone.

So that brings me to the end of my tally of 2011's reading. As I look ahead to 2012, I anticipate spending more time with Tolstoy—reading some of his shorter works; as well as with Gogol—his novel Dead Souls. I'm planning on dipping again into Library of America editions of William Faulker and Zora Neale Hurston that I bought during the summer of 2010. I'd also like to read the short story collection Hue and Cry, by James Alan McPherson, who seemed to come up a lot in my AA Voices class this time around.

Beyond that, who knows?

As I wrote this post, I was a little surprised by how much I read this year (and I didn't even mention all of the Judy Blume and Roald Dahl I read to my daughters before bedtime). Part of me (and I fear, part of you, dear reader) wonders, Where did I get all the time to do this? Don't I have a life?

To answer those questions in order: I don't know, and, I think so.

I don't think I neglect my family to read. I do exercise somewhat regularly. I prepare my classes thoroughly and carefully, and grade papers promptly and conscientiously. In fact, much of what I've been reading lately is directly useful in my teaching.

Perhaps the biggest factor is that I watch almost no TV. Not that there's anything wrong with TV. A year or two ago I got completely addicted to The Wire and watched all 60 episodes in a month and a half. But somehow I just generally don't have the patience for TV, strange as that may sound. You have to have a quiet house to watch TV; you have to plop yourself down and passively observe a screen for a set period of time.

This may sound bizarre, too, but in the end I guess I read so much because it seems to me that reading is one of the best things that life has to offer.

New Yorker Fiction 2011

This year the magazine published 48 pieces of fiction, of which I read 24. Here are my favorites, in chronological order. Not all of them are available online, but I have linked the ones that are:

The King of Norway, by Amos Oz (1/17)—an aborted romance on a kibbutz in Israel

Axis, by Alice Munro (1/31)—a great story about how lives can turn profoundly on a single moment; it just occurs to me now that this story would be an interesting companion to Margaret Atwood's "Stone Mattress," a sort of feminist "Cask of Amontillado" published in the final issue of the year

The Other Place, by Mary Gaitskill (2/14)—a disturbing story about men and violence

Paranoia, by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh (2/28)—an eerie parable of race and class in America

The Trusty, by Ron Rash (5/23)—a convict attempts to escape from the chain gang

Home, by George Saunders (6/13)—a war veteran's struggles

Gravel, by Alice Munro (6/27)—a childhood trauma

Reverting to a Wild State, by Justin Torres (8/1)—tracing, in reverse chronological order, the devolution of a relationship

Tenth of December, by George Saunders (10/31)—a moving iteration of one of Saunders's favorite fictional structures: two characters, lost in their own worlds, who encounter each other out in the world

What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, by Nathan Englander (12/12)—a take-off on Raymond Carver's famous story, this time about two Jewish couples, one ultra-conservative, the other quite secular

If you're curious, here are my favorites from 2008, 2009, and 2010.