The New Yorker Story of the Year!

The New Yorker Story of the Year for 2011 is . . .

"Stone Mattress" by Margaret Atwood.

This definitely wasn't my favorite of the year, and I almost didn't include it in the Top Ten (to see the complete list, with links to the commentary and the stories themselves, go here), but it took the top spot by a margin of 3 votes over "Home" by George Saunders. Third place goes to my favorite, "Going for a Beer" by Robert Coover.

Although I don't keep records, I think more votes were cast this year than ever before.

Congratulations to Margaret Atwood!

New Yorker Story of the Year: 5 Days Left to Vote

Read all about the Top Ten New Yorker Stories of 2011, and then vote in our poll in the sidebar at right. Voting will close at midnight Saturday, December 31, and the winner will be announced on Sunday, January 1.

The New Yorker Story of the Year: The Top Ten

The nominations are closed and it is now time to begin the voting for The New Yorker Story of the Year.

Voting will occur through the poll in the right sidebar of this blog. Votes in the comments section will not be counted. Votes sent to me by email or through some other method will not be counted. Voting will close at midnight on December 31, and I will announce the winner on January 1.

Through a process that combined my own favorites (I did, after all, read all of the stories) and reader nominations, I have determined a list of the Top Ten stories of the year. Several writers this year had multiple stories nominated: Alice Munro, Robert Coover, Ben Marcus, George Saunders. So that they wouldn't be competing against themselves, and to be as inclusive as possible, I allowed only one story per author in the Top Ten.

The Top Ten New Yorker Stories of the Year are (in chronological order):

"The Years of My Birth" by Louise Erdrich (January 10)

"Going for a Beer" by Robert Coover (March 14)

"Clever Girl" by Tessa Hadley (June 6)

"Home" by George Saunders (June 13 & 20)

"Above and Below" by Lauren Groff (June 13 & 20)

"Gravel" by Alice Munro (June 27)

"Homage to Hemingway" by Julian Barnes (July 4)

"What Have You Done?" by Ben Marcus (August 8)

"What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank" by Nathan Englander (December 12)

"Stone Mattress" by Margaret Atwood (December 19 & 26)

The New Yorker: "Stone Mattress" by Margaret Atwood

December 19 & 26, 2011: “Stone Mattress” by Margaret Atwood

The New Yorker’s Holiday Present to you—a story (and quite a good one, at that) that isn’t behind the paywall. This story reminds me somewhat of the Alice Munro story, “Axis,” from earlier in the year, since it involves the passage of a long time after youthful sex, and also deals with a geological formation that plays at least a symbolic role in the story.

Here, sixty-something Verna is on an Arctic cruise, thinking of getting back in the game after taking some time off following the death of her fourth husband. She’s calculating and smart, and she knows she’s better staying away from the married men. But she notices one, a “Bob,” and makes her approach. 

Although he doesn’t remember her, she remembers him quite well—he raped her some 50 years earlier when she was 14. She’d been a sheltered girl up until that point, but she became pregnant, had to give the child up, and never recovered. She begins to plot her revenge . . .

Don’t read the Q&A with Margaret Atwood until you’ve read the story, but be sure and read it. There isn’t much more to say about it beyond what Atwood says. And I won’t discuss it further to avoid spoilers. (Usually in New Yorker stories that doesn’t matter much, but it does in this one.)

The New Yorker: "What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank" by Nathan Englander

December 12, 2011: “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank” by Nathan Englander

I enjoyed this story more than any I’ve read in The New Yorker in some time. According to the Q&A with Nathan Englander, it is the title story to a collection he’s bringing out in February. And, as anyone might guess from the title, the story has parallels with the great Raymond Carver story, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” (Here’s an essay about the Carver story, for anyone who needs a refresher: “Carver’s Couples Talk about Love.”) The connections to Carver’s story are interesting, but Englander’s story absolutely stands on its own.

The story gives us two couples. Mark and Lauren are visiting Florida from Israel, where they have lived for many years, having converted to ultra-Orthodox Judaism (and adopted the names Yerucham and Shoshona). They come to see Debbie, Lauren’s old friend from school, and her husband, the narrator. The narrator at first is bothered by the visitors, and everything about them grates with him. When he offers Mark a drink, though, it turns out that they can share this, at least, and they begin to consume a bottle of vodka. Soon everyone is getting along better, jokes are cracked, etc., and it is then revealed that Debbie and Lauren used to get high when they were younger. And that leads to the two couples smoking dope that Debbie has found in her son’s things, which is a shock to the narrator. But as the four get high, they move into darker territory, eventually playing the “Anne Frank game,” which is speculating about who would and who would not protect you when the next Holocaust comes. This is obviously a serious topic, but on the page it’s quite funny.

Debbie is somewhat obsessed with the Holocaust, and the narrator kids her about it. It would have been a different story, of course, but I might have wanted someone to point out that if a Holocaust comes in America, the signs are pointing to Muslims, not Jews, being its victims. But that’s beside the point. The story also addresses religious purity, and the question of Jewish culture versus Jewish religion.

It seems to me that the magazine often saves some of its strongest work for the end of the year, and this story is no exception to that trend.

Story of the year material?

New Yorker Story of the Year -- Nominations are Open!

Since I began commenting each week on the fiction in the New Yorker, at year's end I have come up with a "Story of the Year." Once again, I will let readers vote from a list of finalists, which I will determine from my own preferences and the nominations of readers.


To see a discussion of last year's winner (Claire Keegan's "Foster"), go HERE.


All you have to do to nominate is to leave a comment here on Perpetual Folly with the name of your choice. I will then compile a list of the top stories and create a poll. All very simple.


Forgot about the stories? No problem. Review them all by browsing through the posts from the whole year: New Yorker 2011.

The New Yorker: "The Musical Brain" by César Aira

December 5, 2011: “The Musical Brain” by César Aira

Chris Andrews, translator

The story begins normally—a family is out to dinner at a hotel restaurant. But then the oddities begin to pile up: a possible book drive being conducted in the restaurant; a visit next door to the theater to see the “musical brain”; a visit to the circus, recently rocked by a scandal involving twin dwarves and the dwarf wife of one of them; and then the bizarre incidents in the theater involving the “musical brain” and the dwarves, AND the former head librarian and school headmistress, who can’t be who the narrator recalls she is.

Fortunately we have the Q&A with the Translator to confirm that this pattern is not unusual for this author:


"But as anyone who has read him knows, the 'correctness' is only syntactic: his sentences are well formed, as the linguists say, but his stories and his books are, well . . . deformed, swerving wildly, jumping from one kind of fiction to another, as in 'The Musical Brain.'"


Good to know. As for what it means . . . the bizarre incidents coincide with the founding of the town library, and so the egg we see at the end (laid by the dwarf and protected by the librarian) would seem to represent literacy, or possibly imagination, since the narrator's own imagination seems to have taken flight as a result of witnessing the events.


Or maybe it's just an egg.


In any case, it's an intriguing read. i'd be interested in seeing more of his work.

The New Yorker: "Leaving Maverly" by Alice Munro

November 28, 2011: “Leaving Maverly” by Alice Munro

Maybe I’m just not in the mood for a Munro story, but this one leaves me cold. Like many of her stories, this one covers several years—proving that short stories don’t have to focus on a short period of time. The problem with trying to fit a long period of time into a short story, however, is that it is difficult to achieve much depth. The reader is always skimming the surface, it seems to me, and unless the occasional dips into the water are sustained, the author risks losing the reader altogether. Which, for me, happened here.

The story is about Ray, the night policeman in a small town, and a young girl, Leah. The girl is from a very strict household—one in which the wife and children aren’t allowed to leave the house—but she is given permission by her father to take a job as ticket taker in a theater (as long as she doesn’t watch or even listen to the films). But she needs an escort to walk her home on Saturday nights, and Ray performs that duty. Ray, meanwhile, is married to Isabel, who left her husband to marry him. But she develops pericarditis and is often too weak to do anything. When Leah disappears, Ray joins the search, but the girl isn’t found because, in fact, she ran off and married the minister’s son.

And so on—Isabel gets sicker, Leah’s marriage goes bad, and eventually, years later, they meet again in the hospital in another city. And maybe they’ll get together, and maybe they won’t, but I don’t think I care. The story is so much on the surface that I don’t engage with any of the characters.

I’d be interested to know how others reacted to this one. I’m a fan of Munro, but not this story.

The New Yorker: "The Climber Room" by Sam Lipsyte

November 21, 2011: “The Climber Room” by Sam Lipsyte

This is the third Lipsyte story in The New Yorker in the last 13 months. The first of the three I didn’t like much. The second one, “Deniers,” I thought was much better. And I liked this one a lot, at least until the ending, and that I’m not so sure about.

The story is about Tovah Gold, who, interestingly, is a minor character in “Deniers.” (Check out the Q&A with Sam Lipsyte in which he’s asked if that suggests he’s working on a bigger project, to which he replies that he’s working on a collection of stories linked by the fact that he wrote them. Heh.) In “Deniers” I liked Tovah because she was a send-up of the pretentious poet. In this story, she’s grown up a little, and is less pretentious, but is attempting recover her fondness for poetry. She is employed in a private pre-Kindergarten, which exhausts her (although it’s a part-time job), and in that capacity comes to know little Dezzy (short for Desdemona), the daughter of Randall Gautier. (When he introduces himself, she thinks he has said “Randy Goat,” which turns out to be close enough.)

Because life isn’t going anywhere for Tovah—not that she’s unhappy, but she’s sort of treading water—she fantasizes about becoming Mrs. Randy Goat. And, more to the point, about having Randy Goat’s baby. She is suddenly, at age 36, anxious to have a baby: “It didn’t matter if the baby was hers except it absolutely did. She wanted to carry it and give birth to it and breast-feed it and live in a natural cocoon with it for as long as possible, with somebody on the outside slipping everything she needed through a slim vent.” (Which makes it seem a bit like prison, doesn’t it?)

And then the story, or its climax, is what actually happens between Tovah and Randy. It allows Lipsyte to give Tovah a nice monologue, which begins, “You know, it’s very hard. Here. In America. In the world. For women.” Which, if this story has a point, is pretty much it. And then . . .

I’m sorry the story is behind the paywall, but I don’t want to give away the ending.

The New Yorker: "Miracle Polish" by Steven Millhauser

November 14, 2011: “Miracle Polish” by Steven Millhauser

The good news is that this week’s story is available for free online. And it’s worth reading. I certainly found myself completely engaged to the end, as I almost always am with Millhauser’s work.

The first person story is about a middle-aged guy who buys some “Miracle Polish” from a door-to-door salesman because he feels sorry for him. The narrator puts the stuff in a drawer and forgets about it until one day he sees a smudge on a mirror. He ends up polishing the whole mirror and what he sees amazes him: “There was a freshness to my image, a kind of mild glow that I had never seen before.” He polishes the other mirrors in his house, and feels silly for being tricked by the polish. His girlfriend comes over and sees it too. The guy gets more mirrors and polishes them all. He’s not only a little compulsive about it, but he thinks of the reflection as somehow separate from himself, and Monica’s from hers. Monica is a bit jealous of her own reflection.

They go on a picnic, which seems to be glorious. Millhauser emphasizes the sunlight—Monica’s blouse has a shimmer to it, she takes her hat off and lets “the sunlight ripple over her face”; a jewel sparkles in her earlobe; she “takes in the sun with closed eyes”. Thanks to the bright sun, then, she seems to have become the woman in the mirror, instead of the dark, tightly wound woman she usually is. But the sun has a different effect on the narrator—the glare of the sun on the water hurts his eyes; the heat is oppressive; he feels despair. But he feels better, oddly, when he sees their reflection in his mirror back home.

Then comes the ultimatum. He must choose between Monica and her reflection. He worries about it and then makes his decision, even though he believes that the reflection is the true Monica, the “hidden Monica.” He thinks, “I was able to see in the depths of those mirrors, the world no longer darkened by diminishing hopes and fading dreams.”

And the story rolls along to its climax.

But what does it all mean? It’s a bit of a fairy tale, it seems to me, in which the narrator learns a lesson about letting the light into his life. But the lesson gets muddled by Monica’s reaction, and the fact that when real life gives her light—on the picnic—she seems to come alive. The light that the narrator sees, though, is artificial. He learns a lesson, but it seems to be the wrong one. And he pays a price.

Another interesting story from Millhauser.

The New Yorker: "The Stain" by Tessa Hadley

November 7, 2011: “The Stain” by Tessa Hadley

Here’s another story by Tessa Hadley, the third this year. I like Hadley’s work, and this story is terrific most of the way, but goes off the rails at the end, in my opinion.

It’s the story of Marina, a working-class woman, the wife of Gary and mother of Liam. Gary’s business isn’t going so well, so Marina needs to earn some extra money. She is hired by Wendy to take care of her father, who lives alone in a big house in their village. Marina is familiar with the house, having passed it often when she was a child, always wondering what it was like inside. Now she knows. It’s dark. It’s unrenovated because the old man didn’t want to change anything—and so there are still the outlines of pictures on the wall that the previous owners have removed.

Wendy and the old man have moved from South Africa, although Wendy’s accent is nearly gone. Marina takes very good care of the man, who becomes very fond of her. He tries to give her money and other gifts and even wants to give her his house. Gary wouldn’t mind if she accepted something—they could use the money or they could put it aside for Liam’s education—but he mostly understands why she won’t. She is briefly in conflict with Wendy and then with Wendy’s son over the old man’s desire to be generous with her.

So far so good. There’s nice tension over the conflict between Marina and the old man and his family. The house is described beautifully. The old man plays with Liam in the garden when Marina brings the boy, and we get a detailed portrait of the character of the old man and Marina. Or at least we think we know the old man. Near the end, the old man’s grandson reveals something about his grandfather—the “stain” of the title—and then the piece is over in a huge rush. Too much of a rush, and that spoiled the story for me.

Check out the Conversation with Tessa Hadley.

The New Yorker: Keep or Throw Away?

A reader of my New Yorker Fiction Commentaries writes:

I have a question which might not deal directly - but certainly indirectly - with this post. I've been subscribing to the NY for the past 4-5 years. I keep all my issues. Which is to say that by now I have two boxes full. I kind of want to get rid of them. Just wondering what other readers do? Maybe I'm just a packrat and throwing them away is no big deal? 
I'd be interested in hearing from you and your readers, or seeing some poll - throw away or keep?
Is there any advantage to keeping these issues or am I just wasting time/space?

We'd love to hear your comments on this. Here's my answer, though. Donate them if you can, recycle them if you can't. When I subscribed to the paper magazine, I recycled them when if finished with them. That was one reason I started my weekly commentary, just so I'd force myself to read the magazine every week. Especially now that subscribers have access to the online archive, I don't see any real reason to hang on to the artifacts. Spread the wealth, one way or another. (My subscription now is on my Kindle, and for a while I was keeping all of the past copies, even those I'd read, but I don't even do that anymore.)

The New Yorker: "Tenth of December" by George Saunders

October 31, 2011: “Tenth of December” by George Saunders

This story is typical Saunders—funny and touching at the same time—with a Joycean epiphany at the end. And although it’s supposed to be behind the paywall, when I clicked on the link the whole story showed up, so you might be in luck.

Saunders gives us the odd voices of two odd characters, both of whom also hear voices. We get young Robin, an overweight kid with a way-overactive imagination, on his way to the pond in the park to do battle with the Nethers, tiny creatures who live in a stone wall and who might have kidnapped the girl he has a crush on who thinks his name is Roger. Also in the park is Donald Eber, a brain-cancer patient who is considering drowning himself in order to end the burden that he has become on his wife and kids.

Meanwhile, Robin discovers Eber’s abandoned coat—abandonment is a theme here—and sees the older man by the pond. So he picks up the coat and instead of going around the pond, he decides to take a shortcut across the ice. Uh oh. Bad idea. It’s not hard to guess what happens next, or what happens after that, or how—given that I’ve mentioned that epiphany—how the story ends.

So it’s not exactly a surprising story, and I’m not a big fan of the epiphany in modern stories, but the story is still enjoyable because of those two whacked-out voices.

Also, check out the Q&A with George Saunders.

The New Yorker: "Sun City" by Caitlin Horrocks

October 24, 2011: “Sun City” by Caitlin Horrocks

I think I liked this story more after I read the brief Q&A with Caitlin Horrocks in which she talks about her own discoveries about the characters while writing the story, and the changes the story went through in drafts. The story is about Rose who has traveled to Sun City, Arizona after the death of her grandmother, Vera. We see Rose and Bev, Vera’s “roommate,” and much of the story is taken up with Rose’s interpretation of the relationship between Vera and Bev, which at first seems less than Rose assumed, and then, in a way, more.

And it is Rose who has come, rather than Rose’s mother, Vera’s daughter, because the two were estranged. In any case, Rose and Bev negotiate over the disposition of Vera’s stuff—costume jewelry, plates and dishes, furniture, her ashes—and the fact that there isn’t more to it is sad, especially because Vera’s estrangement with her daughter, and to a lesser extent her disappointment in Rose, is about her wanting them to want more for their own lives. It turns out she didn’t want much herself. In a telephone conversation, Rose's mother tells her the one thing of Vera's she might want to have, and I think this story misses an opportunity when Rose realizes that Bev has taken it. Rose's choice of letting Bev keep it is fine, but I wish more had been made of the dilemma.

Alcohol has an interesting role here. Vera, at one point in her life, apparently drank a lot. Bev drinks, but kept it hidden from Vera, so as not to tempt her. Rose is a bartender, and also drinks. In the end, Rose displays her talents for Bev by mixing them drinks—an act that Horrocks explains in the Q&A.

It’s a good story, although maybe not a great one.

The New Yorker: "Exorcism" by Eugene O'Neill

October 17, 2011: “Exorcism” by Eugene O’Neill

Eugene O’Neill is spinning in his grave, although it’s fun for us to have this “new” O’Neill play to study. “Exorcism” is a one-act play that was performed in a short run in 1920, after which O’Neill had all the copies destroyed. Except they weren’t, of course, and one recently turned up. It’s being published later this year and you can read it now in The New Yorker (if you have a subscription). (And if you don’t have a subscription, you can still go to the website and check out the video of an actor reading part of the play.)

To the extent there is suspense here, it’s mostly lost when the introduction tells us that the play is autobiographical and deals with O’Neill’s early suicide attempt. So when Ned Malloy drops broad hints (“Later? Supposing there wasn’t any—”), there’s not much doubt about what he means, although his pal Jimmy doesn’t seem to get it. Except he does, apparently, as he reveals later: “You’d been dropping hints—dark, dark hints—you weren’t yourself, you know—and I had my suspicions…”

The play isn’t about an exorcism so much as it is about resurrection. Ned attempts suicide, his friends save him, and now his eyes are open to the possibilities of spring, both literal and metaphorical. There’s been a reconciliation of sorts with his father, cessation of hostilities with his estranged wife, and the doom and gloom (again, both literal and metaphorical) have lifted.

It’s a quick read and I recommend it if you have access to it. But it’s not exactly O’Neill’s greatest work, and I don’t think I can blame him for wanting all traces of it destroyed.

The New Yorker: "Oubliette" by David Long

October 10, 2011: “Oubliette” by David Long

Supposedly, this story is part of a series of “flash fictions” about characters drawn from a novel by Long, which, I would imagine, is why this feels less like a stand-alone story and more like a novel excerpt. Except that it’s pretty short, it doesn’t feel like flash and it also doesn’t feel much like a short story.

Nathalie is the daughter of Peter Chilcott, a documentary filmmaker, and a woman who dies of Huntington’s disease when Nathalie is a teenager. But before she’s diagnosed, and simply behaving oddly, she locks Nathalie in the attic (hence the title). This freaks everyone out, of course, leading to divorce, then diagnosis, then treatment and regular visits. Frankly, I didn’t find it very interesting.

What I found more interesting was the Q&A with DavidLong, in which he says, among other things,

After publishing three short-story collections, I was persuaded to write my first novel, “The Falling Boy,” and then it was as if the short-story switch had been toggled off. “Novels are hard,” I told people, “but they’re less trouble than a book of stories. Novels are mostly middle; stories are all beginnings and endings.”

He goes on to say that after writing several long projects, he was excited to work with a much shorter form. I can relate.

The story is behind the pay wall, but I really don’t think you’re missing much.

The New Yorker: "The House on Sand Creek" by Thomas McGuane

October 3, 2011: “The House on Sand Creek” by Thomas McGuane

Since McGuane has a novel coming out this year, and since I didn’t think this story came even close to being satisfying, I thought it surely must be an excerpt. But based on the Q&A with Thomas McGaune, I guess it isn’t. This is the second Mcguane story in TNY this year, and while I didn’t love the first one, I liked it more than I like this one.

Here’s the basic story (spoiler alert—because you don’t need to bother to read the story): small town lawyer marries Monika, a refugee architectural student from Yugoslavia and moves to the country—into a horrid house vacated by crazy people—but after a while she leaves him and moves home. Lawyer becomes acquainted with Bob, a crazy neighbor. Monika comes back, along with Karel, her child by a Nigerian businessman. Karel enjoys Bob’s company, especially while Lawyer and Monika are fighting. Bob kidnaps Karel, Lawyer summons the boy’s father, but Bob and Karel are found. Life goes on.

And that’s about it. Some of these characters are potentially interesting (Monika, for example, is impulsive and quirky), but in this story I don’t think they’re fully developed. Which is why I thought it was an excerpt. We do get glimpses of themes: the lawyer is fond of Karel and can’t help himself with Monika, who will surely leave him again; Bob is also delusional. Beyond that? There’s not much there.

The New Yorker: "Dog Run Moon" by Callan Wink

September 26, 2011: “Dog Run Moon” by Callan Wink

Sid is on the run from Montana Bob and Charlie Chaplin who are chasing him because Sid stole Bob’s dog. Sid prefers to think of the act as one of “liberation,” however; the dog had been chained up and depressed until Sid freed him. Sid is literally running, though, and because he’s a nude sleeper, he’s not wearing any clothes (since Sid and Charlie came to his house in the middle of the night to reclaim the dog). Nude isn’t the real problem, although he’s going to get very cold when he stops; he’s also barefoot, and the terrain is chewing up his feet.

Meanwhile, the dog is running with him and seems content. Sid, though, is thinking about his ex-girlfriend, also a nude sleeper, for whom he still has strong feelings.

It’s a good story about freedom and loss, and the language is more lyrical (with quirky dialogue--is that how they talk in Wyoming?) than the normal New Yorker story. And although it’s wonderfully implausible, it isn’t hard to suspend disbelief. It’s also a jumble of time, but easy to keep track of. It’s a nice big splash for a young writer. Check out the Q&A with Callan Wink.

The New Yorker: "Starlight" by Ann Beattie

September 19, 2011: “Starlight” by Ann Beattie

This week’s “story” is an excerpt from Ann Beattie’s new “novel,” although it isn’t clear that the book is really a novel, and this excerpt certainly isn’t a story. The portrait it gives of Richard Nixon and his family through the eyes of Pat Nixon is somewhat amusing, but to what end is completely unclear. I like Beattie’s work, but this struck me as a waste of valuable space in the pages of The New Yorker.

On the other hand, the Q&A with Ann Beattie on the website is interesting, and I recommend that.

The New Yorker: "An Anonymous Island" by Yi Mun-yol

September 12, 2011: “An Anonymous Island” by Yi Mun-Yol

What is this, Asia month? Last week we had Haruki Murakami, the great Japanese writer. This week it’s Yi Mun-yol, a Korean writer. Shall we expect a Ha Jin story next week?

Not that I’m complaining. As an “old Asia hand,” I love these writers and always enjoy reading their work. And we haven’t seen nearly enough of Yi (this story prompted me to order one of his books, in fact).

The story is set in Korea, although that isn't specified. Husband and wife are watching TV and the husband seems to disapprove of what he sees. He complains, “How did it get so easy to be anonymous?” If it’s Seoul where they live (the story doesn’t say, but it’s not a rural village in any case), his complaint is reasonable, and it makes him long for his childhood home. The husband’s rant sparks the wife’s memory of an incident from long ago—the real story here.

She was fresh out of college and was sent to teach in a remote elementary school. It’s a village that is essentially just one clan—everyone is related either by blood or marriage—so anonymity is impossible. And yet, there’s an odd stranger in town, Ggaecheol, who can’t be explained. And, eventually, the wife discovers a secret about Ggaecheol and why he is tolerated. And, just to make things interesting, she becomes embroiled in the secret.

Lots to enjoy about this story, especially if you’re at all interested in Asia generally and Korea specifically. There’s very good information, too, in the Q&A with the translator, Heinz Insu Fenkl.