"Two Men Arrive in a Village"

10 July 2025: Listened to Edwidge Danticat read this Zadie Smith story on the New Yorker Fiction Podcast today while I mowed the lawn. So good and sadly, eternally timely. 

"The Bees: Part I"

7 January 2024: Listened to Aleksandar Hemon's story today while finishing my walk and taking down the Christmas lights (the last bit of de-decorating). That's always a bittersweet and not particulary fun task, but this (also bittersweet and also funny) story made it go by quickly.

"Returns"

26 December 2023: Listened to Annie Ernaux's "Returns" on my walk today and could believe how...appropriate it felt. My goodness. 

The 10K streak also hit four years today, which is pretty darn...something?

"Where I'm Calling From"

30 May 2022: Listened to this episode of The New Yorker Fiction Podcast today while collecting and printing sources for my next two entries. Sherman Alexie (who I guess is quietly back after his scandals?) reads Raymond Carver's "Where I'm Calling From." What an interesting story: engrossing, funny, sad, with memorable characters. Structurally, it's fun, too, with a first-person narrator who gives a lot of space to another character's words. It moves between present and the pasts of multiple characters at multiple points. But you can always follow it (even if you are only paying half-attention at moments as you, for example, print off pdf after pdf...). It ends with hope with hopelessness lurking on the margins, entirely appropriate for a story about addiction and getting sober. 

"The Falls"

22 May 2022: "Good God, but life could be less than easy, not that he was unaware that it could certainly be a lot worse, but to go about in such a state, pulse high, face red, worried sick that someone would notice how nervous one was, was certainly less than ideal, and he felt sure that his body was secreting all kinds of harmful chemicals and that the more he worried about the harmful chemicals the faster they were pouring out of wherever it was they came from." --George Saunders, "The Falls"

Listened to this story on The New Yorker Fiction Podcast today while I cleaned the kitchen. I found it quite moving and felt myself relating to Morse and his inner-dialogue. The ending--which Will Mackin and Deborah Treisman say some really smart things about--has been on my mind all day. 

"The Proxy Marriage"

24 November 2021: Listened to this story this afternoon while water-sealing the fence (finally) and taking my walk. Been thinking about it ever since--the last paragraph especially, since in their discussion, Treisman and Patchett sort of disagreed about how to read the final lines. Relating perhaps (ha) a bit too much, I find myself fully ambivalent.

"In answer, she drew him close, to kiss the bride. William buried his hands in her curls, at the base of her neck, and felt her long-desired body press against him. Her soft mouth against his. The gingery smell. He thought he might weep with the relief of it, with the release of all the years of waiting, the intermittent periods of suppressed grief. Equal affection. Was this it? It didn’t have to be exactly equal. He would take anything close."

"Corrie"

25 November 2019: “She gets up and quickly dresses and walks through every room in the house, introducing the walls and the furniture to this new idea. A cavity everywhere, most notably in her chest.” –Alice Munro, “Corrie”

Listened to this story today, read by Margaret Atwood, on the New Yorker Fiction Podcast. It kind of blew me away. The quiet revelation at the end. The sense of a profound shift in what you thought to be true (reflected in the passage above). The little details that pay off again and again. What a treat. And what a treat to listen to Atwood and Deborah Treisman talk about the piece. Atwood isn’t afraid to resist readings or interpretations she doesn’t like. There’s something refreshing about that.

"Leopard"

24 June 2018: Listened to this story this morning on my walk. It's an amazing portrait of an eleven year old's mind. That it is read by David Sedaris, who then discusses it afterwards, is a terrific bonus. Give it a listen.

"Twin Beds in Rome"

"The Maples had talked and thought about separation so long, it seemed it would never come. For their conversations, increasingly ambivalent and ruthless, as accusation, retraction, blow, and caress alternated and canceled, had the final effect of knitting them ever tighter together in a painful, helpless, degrading intimacy...Bleeding, mangled, reverently laid in its tomb a dozen times, their marriage could not die. Burning to leave one another, they left, out of marital habit, together. They took a trip to Rome." --the opening paragraph from John Updike's "Twin Beds in Rome"

Four posts in a row from New Yorker fiction podcasts! I will have to find something different for tomorrow as I have burned through my stash, but man...this is a great story. A fantastic portrait of marriage.

"The Surrogate"

9 October 2017: “Which just goes to show that you mustn’t trust a scrupulous realism— that sometimes sloppy fantasy comes closer to the true state of things.” –Tessa Hadley’s “The Surrogate”

Three posts in a row on New Yorker fiction podcast stories. Since I tend to save these for when I have big blocks of uninterrupted time, this is a sure sign that I’ve been spending a lot of time in my own head-space. Perhaps that latter fact is why this particular story’s theme—a kind of exploration of fantasy—stood out to me. In the discussion of the story after she’s done reading it out loud, Curtis Sittenfeld says of the piece’s main character, “Her fantasies…hinge on being unrealized, which I think it not that unusual.” I like that thought a lot, too--or at least I like thinking about it.

"The Frog Prince"

8 October 2017: "And they found a certain contentment, living more or less happily ever after, which is what now is when one's in it." --the closing lines of Robert Coover's "The Frog Prince"

What a strange little story this is. And what a strange twist and unexpectedly upbeat ending. (I think?) Listen to it here.

"In the Middle of the Fields"

7 October 2017: “‘You thought you could forget her,’ she said, ‘but see what she did to you when she got the chance.’” --the main character in Mary Lavin's "In the Middle of the Fields," almost at the very end of the piece.

Finally got around to listening to this story this evening, finishing it up on a drive I took just because. It's such a smart meditation on love, loss, and grief.

"The King of Norway"

...still running a bit behind, so this post is a day late.

12 January 2014: Driving home from my friend's house (a three hour trip), I found myself listening to the "New Yorker Fiction Podcast." (I've blogged about this podcast before.) Given recent events, I was a bit down, contemplative, somber. The story I listened to, Amos Oz's "The King of Norway," hit all of those notes, and was on my mind the rest of the day.

I keep thinking about Zvi, one of the story's characters, who always announces the news of world tragedies to his companions. When another character asks him, "Why do you take all the sorrow of the world on your shoulders?", he answers, "Closing your eyes to the cruelty life is, in my opinion, both stupid and sinful. There's very little we can do about it. So we have to at least acknowledge it." I am pretty sure I don't agree with all of that sentiment, but this character, so broken and sorrowful yet with some kind of quiet nobility, will stick with me.

So, today, I am grateful for this author, this story, this character, all coming to me courtesy of this podcast. 

Tobias Wolff on Fiction...

One of my most fortunate recent discoveries is the New Yorker Fiction Podcast. Every month a writer chooses a story from the New Yorker archives, reads it aloud, and then discusses it briefly with the magazine's fiction editor. Coming across these stories is like stumbling upon a treasure chest. Just a few titles that I've been introduced to and fell in love with: "Reunion," by John Cheever, read by Richard Ford; "“How to Date a Brown Girl (Black Girl, White Girl, or Halfie),” by Junot Diaz, read by Diaz and selected by Edwidge Danticat; “The Gospel According to Mark,” by Jorge Luis Borges, read by Paul Theroux; "A Day," by William Trevor, read by Jhumpha Lahiri; “Bullet in the Brain,” by Tobias Wolff, read by T.C. Boyle; "The Wood Duck," by James Thurber, read by Jonathan Lethem; "Dance in America," by Lorrie Moore, read by Louise Erdrich; and "Last Night," by James Salter, read by Thomas McGuane.

(Yes--that's a long list, but what can I say?)

Anyway, just the other day I listened to another fabulous story, one of my favorites so far, "Dog Heaven," by Stephanie Vaughn, read by Tobias Wolff. But just as much as I enjoyed the story, so too did I love the post-reading discussion between Wolff and Deborah Treisman. I found myself stopping the podcast and going to back to replay Wolff's lovely description of fiction--and what he finds so appealing about Vaughn's story:

“In fact, we’re always living next door to worlds that we don’t suspect and the best fiction suddenly illuminates that thing that’s been beside us all along and makes us see it for the first time and makes us enter another world.”

That's great stuff, right?