in every 'new yorker' short story ever...

17) protracted anthropomorphic metaphors e.g. 'as ever, Lorinoma wants to grasp the hands of the grandfather clock, stare into its face, and plead for leniency and respite'

18) epigram by marcel proust or joni mitchell

18)sinewy limbs

11) aging academics have sex

oh come on, that's totally hot.
http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y218/JennV1988/rachel_dratch53.jpg

19) description of narrator's family rituals as if the narrator is revealing some precious secret instead of simply how her daughter peels a fucking grapefruit

I never read NYer short stories, unless they're by writers I already like, like Updike or Murakami.

-- jaymc, Monday, January 21, 2008 1:08 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

I usually think of The New Yorker Short Story as a genre that includes the ones by lesser writers but from which the better ones are exempt

tracer otm w. 19 ^

'they walked to school hand in hand, avoiding the cracks on the sidewalk'

Typified by the stories of Antonya Nelson:

My family owns a house in Telluride” was his favorite, most useful line. He used it on a particular kind of girl or woman, somebody with whom he could not foresee a future, somebody who he knew would one day perceive him truly, with X-ray eyes, and move on. In the meantime, he could take her for a long weekend to Telluride.

20) atheist longs for faith of youth, walks into religious establishment and feels 'hollow'

melancholy family pets
melancholy children
melancholy babies

Marissa Silver:

It was sad. Of course it was sad. But she didn’t feel sad. Sad was what people said they were in the face of tragedies as serious as suicide bombings or as minor as a lost earring. It was a word that people used to tidy up and put the problem out of sight.

21) ^^ anhedonia in any form whatsoever ^^

John Burnside:

The way she spoke, it was as if she’d made the journey herself, but she hadn’t. She’d never even left Scotland, and all that talk about the Montreal customs was just stuff she’d picked up from Caroline, who’d been back three times in the six years since she got the job in Montreal. Not long before her last visit, though, she had met this new boyfriend and had started making a big thing about how it was our turn to go over there.

22) Everything narrated in *hushed tones*

22) hushed even tones, preferably with a pretentiously thin vocabulary

23) stalwart avoidance of brand names or recognizable products and replacement with generic signifiers 'listened to his ipod' becomes 'put on some headphones'

or

24) slavish devotion to product tags and their social import 'i wasn't sure if i was allowed to drink progresso soup -- my family stuck with the ineffable security of campbells'

hi, i'm ira glass

Maxim Biller:

It was a very cold day. He hadn’t closed the balcony door overnight, and when he breathed out a small cloud of vapor rose from his mouth. He lay in bed with only his face outside the covers, making clouds of vapor. Another five, no, another ten of them, and he’d get up.

She hadn’t kissed him when she awoke at dawn. She had simply reached for him, and when he’d been lying on top of her she hadn’t given him any help, but it had been quite easy all the same. She hadn’t kissed him before she left, either, and he’d fallen back asleep straightaway and dreamed of a bottle of Corona as large as the water pump in Monbijouplatz.

The New Yorker Story is a single, unending story

Corona as large as the water pump in Monbijouplatz Corona as large as the water pump in Monbijouplatz Corona as large as the water pump in Monbijouplatz Corona as large as the water pump in Monbijouplatz Corona as large as the water pump in Monbijouplatz Corona as large as the water pump in Monbijouplatz

bahahaha ANHEDONIA otm

25) decisive, 'edgy' lack of closure.

yeah, anhedonia is like the word I've been trying to think of all my life to describe those stories

I was going to say 'it should be its own genre,' but basically isn't modern literary writing the anhedonia genre?

26) someone goes home, has mixed feelings about being home

27) someone remembers college, has mixed feelings about college

Fun fact everyone probably already knows: Anhedonia was the original title of Annie Hall.

didn't know, but appreciate

28) scene at an empty Atlantic beach in midwinter

29) protagonists subconsciously haunted by 9/11

30) minor act of passing kindness on final page miraculously restores protagonist's faith in humanity

31) second home/vacation home

although, in every TWENTIETH story, trailer or ghetto rowhouse

32) Someone makes cultural or grammatical mistake in a charming way on final page miraculously restores protagonist's faith in humanity

I rarely feel like the protagonist of a NY story has the balls either to renounce or regain faith in humanity

@ 30: 'for there, on her desk, lay Nai Nai's jade bracelet, polished and gleaming proud for the first time the events of Nanking seventy years prior.'

first time since

33) desultory and minimal knowledge of Important Historical Event gleaned from wikipedia and a high school textbook.

34) people haunted by something

34a) haunted by death of family member

35) Dude pops boner, feels bad about it

36) adultery

there are frequent short stories in the new yorker these days that don't conform to stereotype, to be fair.

still, lol at "Claymer."

I never really saw anybody use "anhedonia" except when referring to the original title of Annie Hall.

Does anyone remember a television commercial where there was a redneck in a hunting outfit with a shotgun walking in the woods and saying "They say a revenuer come up in the these parts, he might get better but he never get well"? You couldn't figure exactly what it was a commercial for until the very end when the Yankee (or Midwestern) voiceover man said "from the story 'Moonshine' in the January New Yorker." Like they were trying to change it up, get the naysayers to lose the scent of their trail.

2) effete professor mulls lustily over graduate student and her lovely paper on Kafka.

Recommendations for actual similar stories, plz

See: whatever story of Philip Roth's became The Ghost Writer.

Although I think that was in The Atlantic.

33) desultory and minimal knowledge of Important Historical Event gleaned from wikipedia and a high school textbook.

-- remy bean, Monday, January 21, 2008 1:42 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Link

as opposed to ilx poster remy bean who saw his buddies die face down in the muck at da nang

Mark it a zero, Smokey.

"I never really saw anybody use "anhedonia" except when referring to the original title of Annie Hall."

i think of jarboe too. ex-swans artiste. she had an album called *Anhedoniac*.

To me the story seems like an awkward attempt to give the 2000s the same gauzy, heady perfume of nostalgia that Paris in the 1960s often gets

Brand new, you're retro

the first bit is cute, if overwritten in the way TH suggests. the plot development is like lightweight writers-workshop "idea-driven" sci-fi.

seriously. if i read this in a "dangerous visions" style collection i'd feel hella disappointed.

ehh, I don't have the patience to argue this point with you. If you don't find that story -- or that excerpt -- smugly 'clever' than we will just leave it at that.

Agreed, my problem with the story is the heavy-handedness, which goes along with the awkward tone.

xp

considering the sludge that the NYer can sometimes put between its covers, this story is really not that bad, not too offensive, from what little i have read. the writing--at least the first page or so--does not seem too cute or too clever at all.

"Sunita buzzed up fat Constantine, who was hefting a box of mangoes in his meaty hands."

"Otto was a long-haired German who shot music promos. 'I need information, man,' he said, shrugging. We were sitting in a sushi bar, drinking green tea. 'I don’t care how it gets to me.'"

My main problems with the story are that it seems more about an idea than about characters, that that idea isn't a very interesting or original idea, and that the writing generally isn't very good.

hey look there a pile of shit on the ground - its kinda greenish isnt it - ohh is that some corn i see in there!

Look, it is soooooo hard to write about any mode of dress well in the context of fiction, because it has to do all of those things.

-- suzy, Tuesday, March 11, 2008 2:57 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Link

"It's hard to do x well" should not be used to defend stories that are supposed to represent the best of contemporary fiction. This is The New Yorker. Glimmer Train is down the hall.

http://www.serenedominic.com/snob1.jpg

http://nla.gov.au/nla.pic-an24130627-v

Oh god am I glad I don't typically expect the NYer to provide the best of contemporary fiction! The only time I'll really get on them about that is with debut fiction issues; for most of the regular issues it's just popular authors who have name recognition with the demographic, and have a story that needs conversion into a paycheck.

Wait, does that make sense? I get pissed off when they debut of first-expose writers I don't think are particularly good or promising, but can't work up a sweat about established writers dropping in sub-par stories.

A lot of that is based on some fear that if the NYer today were seriously spending its time trying to find and boost the best young writers, it would screw up the world entirely, give them some weird and awful power over the industry, create a what's-new cycle that celebrates writers for two years and then leaves them out to dry as they mature -- just generally create something about like indie bands and blogs, only in a much worse way.

i let my subscription lapse - its just factoids w/a side of shitty fiction

Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. ... oh wait

I pretty much never read NYer fiction unless it's an author I already like (Updike, Murakami, etc.).

On one hand, I guess it's silly to expect The New Yorker to mean to fiction what it did fifty years ago when the fiction landscape has completely changed. Also it's probably easy for me to idealize the old New Yorker with a filter through which only the best material has passed. OTOH with declining print space devoted to fiction, I'd think The New Yorker could be more choosy and I've been a little disappointed with their choices -- the writing they choose these days that isn't Doctorow or Munro or Updike too often has a *lifestyle* feel.

I don't know who either Mr Burt Stanton or Mr (?) jhoshea are, but boy, that (3 posts up) just made me laugh out loud.

I'm impressed or pleased, I think, that anyone buys and reads The New Yorker. Good for you!

seriously, i started feeling so much better about myself and my life when i stopped expecting the New Yorker to ever have good fiction.

id read that rag from front to back then find myself telling everyone abt all the fascinating things i learned - srsly that is no way to be.

eh, New Yorker non-fiction at its best can be revelatory, although the lesser stuff tends to just sort of ramble on. I think they've been way overdoing their primary coverage. "Hillary's Latest Comeback" is just not worth anywhere near the wordage they give it.

im just kind of joking abt hating the nyer kind of

although i did let my sub lapse a while ago

damn son i thought we was fam

― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Tuesday, January 22, 2008 12:11 AM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

minstrel

― Arms, Tuesday, January 22, 2008 12:12 AM Bookmark

This thread kind of makes me glad I don't have the time or energy to get all worked up about stuff like this anymore.

"10) over-developed "ethnic" backstory closely mirroring writer's own"

i swear this is a plot to get me to never read international fiction. cuz i see those stories and my eyes glaze over and i reach for a slim volume of ring lardner.

racist