But Call Me Betsy

Catching up on the fiction in The New Yorker , and so just read Jonathan Lethem's story from April 7, "Pending Vegan." Have I read any of his novels before? I have a vision in my head that he has a book with fat stars on the cover or am worried that he might be the guy who wrote Incredibly Loud and Too Close, or whatever that title is for the book about people trapped in elevators (I am joking, of course! I know that it's about 911. I have zero interest in reading it, even though it might change my life. I feel weirdly resistant to reading books from a kid's point of view, as I think it's really hard to do well without sounding saccharine. There are exceptions, like Mark Haddon and Ian McEwan in Atonement and Dorothy Allison, but get off my back, will you?). Okay, I just Googled him and he's written nothing else that I've ever read, though he is a prolific and successful writer. This story is about an anxious taking his twin girls to Sea World. T...

I just discovered the coolest, nerdiest thing--I wanted to write this blog post about "Under the Sign of the Moon," which is the latest Tessa Hadley short story in the March 17 issue of The New Yorker.  I was basically going to write something about how I didn't understand the story--and then lo and behold, the online version has a section called, "This Week in Fiction" where they interview writers about the stories that have just appeared. I haven't read the author's explanation yet, so I'll say that the story starts with this older woman, Greta, who is on the train, going to visit her daughter in Liverpool. While she's traveling, she meets an odd young man dressed in this old-fashioned way, who seems to take an interest in her that's beyond the normal polite conversation. There's something about him that's unsettling, and he seems like he's spent lots of time in the company of older people. She tries to avoid him so she can just...

I'm reading a short story from the March 17 issue of The New Yorker by T. Coraghessan Boyle called "The Relive Box."  I haven't finished it, because I keep getting interrupted by my book (Moss in No Country for Old Men got killed off last night with no fanfare. I knew that might happen, but his murder was so understated that I wasn't at first sure if he was killed or if it was a different victim). And I also haven't finished the story because I'm not in love with tales that have a futuristic angle. For example, I love George Saunders' short stories, but I didn't love that one story where you could buy those Russian slaves as decorations--can't think of the title now--they seem like an almost too obvious critique of how shallow and disconnected our culture has become. In any case, this story so far takes place in the not too distant future where you purchase a devise called the relive box. This is like a DVD player that allows you to sit quietl...