Recent Fiction
"All the Summers Ahead" | Five Chapters
"Barnegat Bay" | The Good Men Project
"Light at New Latitude" | PANK
"Social Utility" | Keyhole
"Where the Dust Went" | Atticus Review
From The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” Q & A with Fiction Editor Deborah Treisman:
QUESTION FROM DRIEDCHAR: Maile Meloy (b. January 1, 1972) is in my opinion the magazine’s best short story writer. I’m disappointed she’s not on the list.
DEBORAH TREISMAN: Me, too. She was working on young-adult fiction and wasn’t able to get a story to us. We’ve published her several times over the years and are great admirers of her work.
Lots of fiction goodness over at the Times.
Their choices for the ten best books of 2009 include Maile Meloy’s Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It (reviewed by Curtis Sittenfeld). One of the stories from the collection, “Travis, B.,” is available online courtesy of Penguin:
Chet Moran grew up in Logan, Montana, at a time when kids weren’t supposed to get polio anymore. In Logan, they still did, and he had it before he was two. He recovered, but his right hip never fit in the socket, and his mother always thought he would die young.
When he was fourteen, he started riding spoiled and un-broke horses, to prove to her that he was invincible. They bucked and kicked and piled up on him, again and again. He developed a theory that horses didn’t kick or shy because they were wild; they kicked and shied because for millions of years they’d had the instinct to move fast or be lion meat.
“You mean because they’re wild,” his father had said when Chet advanced this theory.
Michiko Kakutani is only half-impressed with Alice Munro’s latest collection, Too Much Happiness:
Read on →