nomadreader

The backstory: Confession: the first thing I do when I wake up on Monday morning is grab my Kindle and see who wrote this week's fiction selection. Sometimes I'll go on to read it immediately. Sometimes I'll wait until I've had my coffee. This week, however, I was baffled. I'd never heard of Callan Wink, the author. When I flipped to the Contributors page I learned "Callan Wink lives in Livingston, Montana. He is currently pursuing his M.F.A. at The University of Wyoming." I was so excited for Callan Wink, an unknown M.F.A. student in Montana to score a story in The New Yorker . When I tried to find out more about him Monday, this librarian discovered very little. When I tried again on Friday, I was overrun with blog posts and articles about this very story. Cheers to you Callan! The first line: "Sid was a nude sleeper."   My thoughts: One thing I've come to love about reading short stories is how little the subject matters to me. With ...

Welcome to the first installment of Short Story Saturday, a new semi-regular feature. The project stems from a desire to read more short stories. It's not a secret I prefer novels to short stories, but I'm working to stretch myself as a reader, and part of that will be reading more short stories. When I have read short story collections, I've often found them hard to review as a whole. This feature will allow me to review collections as a whole or separately, but I'll also be reviewing individual stories from a variety of sources. First up: "Home" by George Saunders, which appeared in the 2011 Summer Fiction issue of The New Yorker. The backstory: When I went to see Karen Russell and Julie Orringer earlier this year , I asked them about who and what they were reading and how their reading habits differed while writing. Both mentioned George Saunders as a perennial source of information. I've never read Saunders (largely because he doesn't write nov...

Suddenly I want to read more John Updike: "When she was dead, I rejoiced, to a degree. Her death removed a confusing presence from the world, an index to its unfulfilled potential. There. You see why I am not given to introspection. Scratch the surface, and ugliness pops up." - from "The Full Glass", published in The New Yorker, May 26, 2008

One of my favorite parts of The New Yorker are the movie reviews. I don't mean the glowing reviews of art house movies my non-Manhattan dwelling self will finally get from Netflix two years from now. I look forward to reading the fine print in the "Now Playing" section about mainstream movies I know the reviewers will hate, but they still discuss it in a ridiculously high brow manner. Summer blockbuster season is ideal for my viewing pleasure. Here is a collection of this week's gems: Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay "This cinematic burlesque show, in which the baggy pants keep dropping and occasionally fall off altogether, is perhaps the first bottomless comedy---much of the humor, and a fair amount of the nakedness, is concentrated below the belt." Superfluous plot details. "The Harold & Kumar movies, in their slovenly way, mark the transition to a post-racial society in which, as the Salon movie critic Stephanie Zacharek put it, ...