As short story lovers know, reading an excellent short story is more profound than sex, more satisfying than a hot fudge sundae, more likely to stick to your emotional ribs than even the hottest prestige TV episode. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, George Saunders argues that reading short stories enhances the part of the self “that reads the world; it can deceive us, but it can also be trained to accuracy; it can fall into disuse and make us more susceptible to lazy, violent, materialistic forces, but it can also be urged back to life, transforming us into more active, curious, alert readers of reality.” In other words, being good readers can help make us better people in the world.
This blog aims to be a resource for readers and writers of well-made short stories. It hopes to add nutrients to the contemporary short story ecosystem by analyzing recent stories from The New Yorker and providing a forum for discussing them. We might think of it as a remora attached to Saunders’ whale of a book. Or we might just say, if Saunders’ work is valuable, let’s do more of it. There are some excellent blogs that interview writers about their stories (e.g. Kelly Fordon’s “Let’s Deconstruct a Story”), and The New Yorker itself has a podcast in which writers talk about their favorite stories from the magazine. This blog wants to add to a conversation about stories that I think can be even more robust. Reviewers tend to treat story collections through broad themes and general impressions; they rarely do justice to what individual stories are trying to achieve or suggest, much less how they do or don’t work. Classic and recent short stories get dissected in creative writing classrooms, which is great, and this blog hopes to make those sorts of discussions more accessible. This blog also hopes to bring literary criticism more up to the moment, making it a companion to readers virtually in real time.
Maybe the best and most widely read—and, ironically, most complained about—venue for short stories is The New Yorker. In some quarters, New Yorker stories have a reputation for opacity, slightness, and inexplicable endings. But I generally find them to be excellent—extremely well-made, and more various in style and subject than critical wags give them credit. I’ve also chosen The New Yorker because it has over a million subscribers, and it’s widely available in public libraries. I also understand that guests can get a free article or two a month from The New Yorker if you access it via a link provided by a subscriber, so definitely click on the link to the original story–you may be able to read for free! New Yorker stories also appear on a weekly basis. I hope to respond to them more or less as you’re reading them. But rather than respond to each one, I hope to take up a new story every two to four weeks.
My emphasis will be on how the story’s structure generates its meaning and the moves I think the writer had to make to get the story to work. In other words, yes, I confess, I’m a longtime teacher of creative writing and that may show at times—hopefully in a good way!
In the comments section, I hope you’ll take issue with what I say, point out all the things I missed, and give your own impressions.
Andy Mozina 