Review: The New Yorker Fiction Podcasts

On a whim, I started downloading the free New Yorker Fiction Podcasts available from the iTunes store. I was skeptical at first because my impressions of New Yorker fiction have always been somewhat negative; my impression was that they were always too impressed with themselves or too urban (read: about NYC) to consistently appeal to someone living outside of the big apple. And there are certainly some stories like this here: James McCourt’s depiction of a cinematic femme fatale in “Avenged” was to my eye overwritten and boring. But I have to eat some crow here: I was completely mistaken. Most of the stories are not only really entertaining, but cover a wide range of fiction: you can hear stories from such notables as Jamaica Kincaid, Denis Johnson, Kazuo Ishiguro, Alice Monroe, James Salter, Roberto Bolaño, and Donald Bartheleme. I’ve also been introduced to some writers that I had never heard of before: two of Stephanie Vaughn’s excellent tales about a military family stationed in Fort Niagara and - my favorite one so far - Stewart Dybek's hypnotic Russian-doll of a story called "Paper Lantern."

The podcasts are hosted by the fiction editor of the New Yorker, Deborah Treisman, who sets the scene by introducing and interviewing  the narrator for a few minutes before (s)he reads any story of their choosing from The New Yorker archives. After the presentation then the two of them discuss and analyze the story. For non-professional narrators, the stories are almost always engaging, and their insights into the stories both thoughtful and enlightening. My favorite reader so far is either Salman Rushdie’s pitch-perfect take on Donald Barthelme’s “Consider the Bodyguard,” a difficult tale composed entirely of questions, or Orhan Pamuk’s rich Slavic baritone narration of Vladimir Nabokov’s “My Russian Education.” Some of the parings don't seem to match at first, like Allegra Goodman's bubbly voice reading the very-male narration of John Updike's "A&P" or Anne Enright's thick Irish brogue presenting  John Cheever's very American "The Swimmer," but in both cases the narrator won me over in the end. I'm not sure why this is - it might be that since the narrators are all authors themselves, their love of the words carries over into the recording. All I know is that I've been really enjoying them and plan on checking out the entire series. Next up: David Means reading Raymond Carver's "Chef's House."

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Running with Podcasts
Cross Posted on Thought Ambience

The New Horror in Short Stories

...I was beat. Arguing with the children, a trip to the dentist, then endless shopping for invisible things--toilet paper, glue, salt. Things no one ever knows are there until they're gone and are then needed desperately. An invisible day where you exhaust yourself running around, doing thankless errands that are necessary but meaningless: the housewife's oxymoron.

- Jonathan Carroll, "The Sadness of Detail", page 207 of Poe's Children.

Poe's Children is a compilation of what editor Peter Straub labels the "New Horror" - authors that strive to escape the ghettos of typical horror fiction in favor of "literature" (or at least genre mixing). Like all short story anthologies, not all of the stories are successful, even if they all are variations of a theme. So far, the ones that  work for me are the ones that provoke a visceral reaction - either of horror, disgust, or wonder. To me, that's what horror as a genre is all about - lifting you out of he mundane world Carroll describes so aptly above. For example, Kelly Link's “Louise’s Ghost” is a story that's certainly interesting and has a fun conceit - the entire story is about two women both named Louise so it's difficult to tell who is doing or saying what for a while - but it didn't present any wow moments to me (unlike the other stories she presented in Stranger Things Happen). No, the strongest stories here either shock like Dan Chaon's “The Bees” (a truly disturbing tale of supernatural redemption) or present a situation to you in an entirely new way like Carroll's story or Elizabeth Hand's “Cleopatra Brimstone” (the best story i've read in 2001, hands down).

Still only halfway through the book, but so far it's half hits, half misses. A pretty good showing in my book. Hey, hitting .500 would win you the batting title and $250 million dollars, so Straub did something right!

Related Posts:
Defending the Short Story

Cross Posted at Thought Ambience

Don DeLillo's The Angel Esmeralda

I just bought The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories, by Don DeLillo.

The New Yorker, which generally gives books only brief, one-paragraph reviews, has given Martin Amis several pages to ramble on about Don DeLillo in general, and this collection of short stories in particular.    I'm not a fan of the first person plural in reviews.  For example:

DeLillo is the laureate of terror, of modern or postmodern terror, and the way it hovers and shimmers in our subliminal minds. As Eric Hobsbawm has said, terrorism is a new kind of urban pollution, and the pollutant is an insidious and chronic disquiet. Such is the air DeLillo breathes. And so strong is this identification that we feel slightly dislocated when, in “The Ivory Acrobat” (1988), he confronts a form of terror that is “natural” and therefore ancient and innocent: the earthquake.

Just how is it you know that I also feel slightly dislocated, Martin?  (I presume that I may call you Martin, since we are on such intimate terms that you presume to speak for how I feel.)

In the end, Martin concludes with a simple declaration that he loves the book.  You don't often get that kind of unabashed affection in the New Yorker.  Or in the New York Times.

But, Michiko Kakutani, writing in the Arts section, notes of the title story that, "this tale not only uses all of Mr. DeLillo’s electric gifts of language but also is one of his rare, deeply emotional forays into the human heart."  And Liesl Schillinger, in a longer review in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, concludes that "DeLillo packs fertile ruminations and potent consolation into each of these rich, dense, concentrated stories."

Note that none of these authors are unabashed DeLillo fans; Amis and Kakutani each carefully explains that he / she doesn't like all of DeLillo's work.  So, this would seem to be a return to form.

Despite some initial skepticism on my part, I look forward to telling you what I think.

Related posts:

DeLillo's Short Stories

Fall Reading List

Defending the Short Story

Delillo's Short Stories

I'm a huge Don Delillo fan. While I don't think that his recent work has reached the heights of Mao II or Underworld, every one of his novels has taught me somehting or has make me ponder something interesting that I hadn't thought of before. And make no mistake about it; Delillo is a novelist, having penned 15 books since 1971.

So it was with some surprise that I discovered that he has a collection of short stories out: The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories. Now, I've read a few of them; at least two were published in Harpers, and, if memory serves, I remember really liking "Hammer and Sickle" while "Baader-Meinhof"- not so much. This disparity in reaction may stem from the fact that these stories were written during a wide range of time: 1979 to the present day. I'm sure i'll pick it up, but i'm afraid I don't have very high expectations for it. What about you?

Related Posts:
Defending the Short Story
Delillo on Baseball

Pulse

In the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani reviews Julian Barnes's new collection of short stories, Pulse, describing some stories as "beautiful, elegiac tales about how marriages endure or change over time" and others as "brittle exercises in craft . . . substituting verbal facility for genuine humor or real feeling." Ah, what to do . . . .

Defending the Short Story

Yesterday, Joel wrote about his dislike for stand-alone short stories, and as the two of us have discussed before, we’ll have to agree to disagree about this. To me, the best short stories are like Tapas to the full-meal of the novel. When done well, they present one of several things:

- A completely focused mood piece. Think of some of Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories, capturing what it feels like to have your first girlfriend break up with you, or to be stuck with insomnia thinking about death. Other examples: Stephen King’s most excellent stories in Skeleton Crew and Night Shift.
- Pondering an idea. Perhaps done best in SciFi, these short stories present an interesting idea and the consequences of that idea. Philip K Dick was the best at this; he’d present an interesting idea that might not hold up over the course of a novel and explore it in a short story. (Note that both Total Recall and Minority Report were adapted from PKD short stories, not novels.)
- Experimenting with form, voice, etc. Authors just fucking around to see what works.

In short, I see a short story as a more informal, concentrated taste of story telling. Potentially containing the possibility of something that could be explored further, but not necessairly. (Of course, i've always been attracted to flaws more that perfection - I wrote a bit about this over here.)

I also think that there are authors that are better at novels and those that are better at short stories (and the rare few, like Stephen King, that are good at both). For instance, I love Haruki Murakami, but (after the quake excepted) his short stories are awful - he needs the space of the novel to present his themes and wandering narrators. I wonder if Ondaatje is one of this authors whose writing favors the novelistic form?

(Cross Posted at Thought Ambience)

The Cat's Table

I tend not to get terribly excited about short stories. Indeed, I've bought only two collections of short stories in the past two years, the outstanding Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro and, almost equally good, The Lemon Table, by Julian Barnes. Neither of these is simply a collection of unrelated short stories. The stories in The Lemon Table are each about old age and death, and the suffering that accompany them. The stories in Nocturnes relate to each other in a manner similar to that of individual pieces of a musical cycle. Though moods and tempos shift from story to story, motifs and themes are woven throughout, connecting them into a greater whole.

So, when it comes to one-off short stories, you see where I am coming from.

Nevertheless, I will sometimes be flipping through my New Yorker and see a new (or previously unread) piece by a favorite novelist. In this week's issue, it was "The Cat's Table," by Michael Ondaatje. So, last night I took a detour from my current novel to read this.

My overall reaction? Meh. A young boy boards a cruise ship to travel alone from Ceylon to England. While not a particularly original setup, it has potential. But an initial shift from the third person to the first person serves no discernible purpose. The ship's stopover in the port of Aden is too-quickly glossed over, and the narrator lingers overlong on the (often unbelievable) activities of his 17-year-old cousin, Emily. Throughout, the language is missing the luminosity of, say, The English Patient.

The New Yorker doesn't say so, but those who follow such things will note that "The Cat's Table" is an excerpt from a full length novel by Ondaatje (titled The Cat's Table), to be published this fall. Fine. But if you are going to publish a short piece, it needs to work as a short piece. I am hopeful that Ondaatje (or his editors, or his agent) simply chose the wrong section to excerpt. At the moment, I am not excited enough to put it on my list of upcoming books to watch for. Maybe when it comes out in paperback...