Sarah Wrote That

"Goofy experiments that would not work in any other format, such as deciding to read the entire 2009 stimulus legislation and blog about it, will be forgiven by many readers on the grounds that we’re all in this experiment together; it’s like going to a rock festival and hearing terrible music but feeling really good about being there."

The New Yorker’s Steve Coll, saying farewell to his blog, for now.

“It Seems That 35 Is When It Clicks”

So The New Yorker is publishing a second list of:

20 individuals under the age of 40 whom they believe to be the most talented and important American [fiction] writers of their generation.

Lists!  They are irresistible!  The Observer thought this list was link-bait interesting enough for not one but three four articles.  Lists ask us to take sides, to pick them apart, gloat or disparage, quibble with their selections or their terms.  New Yorker Editor David Remnick either refreshingly or annoyingly acknowledges the root arbitrariness of it (life can be breezy at the top!):

“You know why we’re doing it this year? Because six months ago, I was brushing my teeth and thought, ‘God, you know, we haven’t done this in a while.”

Yet for writers who make the list there’s something very serious at stake, credibility that may provide insulation from publishers’ demands for blockbusters.  Fiction editor Deborah Treisman says:

We saw at the beginning [of making the list] that a lot of the authors were falling into the 35 to 40 range. It seems that 35 is when it clicks and people really find their voice (emphasis mine).  We actually have quite a few now who are younger than that.” She said one of the authors on the list was born in 1985, and does not even have a book out.

So if the list liberates some of its writers from market demands, I think this is A Good Thing.  But I love the response of Sam Lipsyte (age 41):

“I wish the good people at the New Yorker would have taken into account the fact that I feel thirty-nine, tops.”

Oh, and, New Yorker - you’ve got one of my stories in your slush pile.  So, you know.

I’m Not Going To Spoil It By Quoting…

…because Allegra Goodman’s “La Vita Nuova” (in the May 3 New Yorker) is just that good (I would cut exactly one word).  The juxtapositions of big and little, of direct addresses of the situation and seemingly throwaway details, set up a marvelously skewed narrative space in which ordinary things seem set to detonate, pull us under or lift us away.

I particularly like Goodman’s use of dialogue quoted directly but without quotation marks.  It lets her shift very agilely into different times and registers, closer and further from Amanda’s (the protagonist) point of view.

Writing students leap on instances when New Yorker fiction doesn’t match its myth.  Here it definitely does.

A States That Never Were State Of Mind →

This Is What a Bubble Looks Like →

I’m In The New Yorker…

…events listings:

Another Haiti

The New Yorker’s Jon Lee Anderson remembers the Haiti where his father worked in the fifties

before it was deforested for charcoal for poor people’s firewood… poor but not yet desperate. In those days, it was a green and verdant place, full of little family truck-farms, and the postwar West’s early aid and development specialists who were sent there spoke about the country as the future “breadbasket” of the Caribbean

Read on…

Book Looks, Lit Mags & Wish Lists

Karen Brown’s story in the current issue of Five Points is fantastic.  Also: Birkenstock nuns!  Ummm, band name…

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Adam Shatz: In Orhan Pamuk’s fiction “happiness is always a thing of the past.”

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Robert Scheer interviews Martin Jacques about Jacques’ When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order (positive if qualified Times review here).

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I was making an Amazon wish list to distribute the spring semester reading list to my independent study.  The last list I’d made was for Christmas 2006, and it’s a little startling how many of books and (non-downloadable) albums have since become unavailable, or are now available only as downloads.

Dana Spiotta’s Eat The Document is out of print, but available from $ 0.01.  You can still get the European version of Saint Etienne’s Tiger Bay on CD; worth it for the lovely “I Buy American Records” (!).  Harold Brodkey’s gorgeous This Wild Darkness: The Story Of My Death is also out of print but available from $0.01, apparently the going rate.  When Brodkey disciplines his larger arc, as he does in Wild Darkness, his sentence structures are so beautifully expansive:

I am standing on an unmoored raft, a punt moving on the flexing, flowing face of a river. It is precarious. I don’t know what I am doing. The unknowing, the taut balance, the jolts and instability spread in widening ripples through all my thoughts. Peace? There was never any in the world. But in the pliable water, under the sky, unmoored, I am traveling now and hearing myself laugh, at first with nerves and then with genuine amazement. It is all around me.

Jeffrey Eugenides reads and discusses Brodkey’s short story “Spring Fugue” in a New Yorker podcast.