Longreads Pick
[Fiction] Grit was dead. There was no mistake about that. And on the very day of his burial temptation came to his widow.
Grit’s widow was “Great” Taylor, whose inadequate first name was Nell–a young, immaculate creature whose body was splendid even if her vision and spirit were small. She never had understood Grit.
Returning from the long, wearisome ride, she climbed the circular iron staircase–up through parallels of garlic-scented tenement gloom–to her three-room flat, neat as a pin; but not even then did she give way to tears. Tears! No man could make Great Taylor weep!
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Published: Mar 1, 1921
Length: 29 minutes (7,454 words)
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Murakami has always considered himself an outsider in his own country. He was born into one of the strangest sociopolitical environments in history: Kyoto in 1949 — the former imperial capital of Japan in the middle of America’s postwar occupation. “It would be difficult to find another cross-cultural moment,” the historian John W. Dower has written of late-1940s Japan, “more intense, unpredictable, ambiguous, confusing, and electric than this one.” Substitute “fiction” for “moment” in that sentence and you have a perfect description of Murakami’s work. The basic structure of his stories — ordinary life lodged between incompatible worlds — is also the basic structure of his first life experience.
“The Fierce Imagination of Haruki Murakami.” — Sam Anderson, New York Times Magazine
See also: “Town of Cats.” by Haruki Murakami in The New Yorker, Sept. 5 2011
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Longreads Pick
Murakami has always considered himself an outsider in his own country. He was born into one of the strangest sociopolitical environments in history: Kyoto in 1949 — the former imperial capital of Japan in the middle of America’s postwar occupation. “It would be difficult to find another cross-cultural moment,” the historian John W. Dower has written of late-1940s Japan, “more intense, unpredictable, ambiguous, confusing, and electric than this one.” Substitute “fiction” for “moment” in that sentence and you have a perfect description of Murakami’s work. The basic structure of his stories — ordinary life lodged between incompatible worlds — is also the basic structure of his first life experience.
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Published: Oct 21, 2011
Length: 23 minutes (5,912 words)
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INTERVIEWER
So you chose novel writing as a profession.
BARNES
Oh, I didn’t choose it as a profession—I didn’t have the vanity to choose it. I can perhaps now state that I am at last a novelist, and think of myself as a novelist, and can afford to do journalism when it pleases me. But I was never one of those insufferable children who at the age of seven is writing stories under the bedclothes or one of those cocky young wordsmiths who imagine the world awaits their prose. I spent a long time acquiring enough confidence to imagine that I could be some sort of novelist.
“Interview: Julian Barnes, The Art of Fiction No. 165.” — Shusha Guppy, The Paris Review (2000)
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[Fiction]
When Grace goes looking for the Traverses’ summer house, in the Ottawa Valley, it has been many years since she was in that part of the country. And, of course, things have changed. Highway 7 now avoids towns that it used to go right through, and it goes straight in places where, as she remembers, there used to be curves. This part of the Canadian Shield has many small lakes, which most maps have no room to identify. Even when she locates Sabot Lake, or thinks she has, there seem to be too many roads leading into it from the county road, and then, when she chooses one, too many paved roads crossing it, all with names that she does not recall. In fact, there were no street names when she was here, more than forty years ago. There was no pavement, either—just one dirt road running toward the lake, then another running rather haphazardly along the lake’s edge.
“Passion.” — Alice Munro, The New Yorker, 2004. Pen/O. Henry Prize 2006
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Longreads Pick
[Fiction] When Grace goes looking for the Traverses’ summer house, in the Ottawa Valley, it has been many years since she was in that part of the country. And, of course, things have changed. Highway 7 now avoids towns that it used to go right through, and it goes straight in places where, as she remembers, there used to be curves. This part of the Canadian Shield has many small lakes, which most maps have no room to identify. Even when she locates Sabot Lake, or thinks she has, there seem to be too many roads leading into it from the county road, and then, when she chooses one, too many paved roads crossing it, all with names that she does not recall. In fact, there were no street names when she was here, more than forty years ago. There was no pavement, either—just one dirt road running toward the lake, then another running rather haphazardly along the lake’s edge.
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Published: Mar 22, 2004
Length: 46 minutes (11,526 words)
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[Fiction]
I had my corner. Right across the street, beside the subway stairs. Where the office men come up early with their crisp hats and their stiff collars, with their shoes dusty and scraped from the crowds. That’s where I met them every morning with my rags and brushes. Pesterton Polish, el el see. Second generation enterprise, family shingle—the brush kit was my dad’s and he bought it from an older Clovis for three dollars fifty the day after my grandfather fell. My dad shined for ten years, taught me to do the same, then died on his way home one night with the kit in his hand. His heart, Doctor Fessenden said.
“Peerless.” — Karen Munro, Strange Horizons
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Longreads Pick
[Fiction] I had my corner. Right across the street, beside the subway stairs. Where the office men come up early with their crisp hats and their stiff collars, with their shoes dusty and scraped from the crowds. That’s where I met them every morning with my rags and brushes. Pesterton Polish, el el see. Second generation enterprise, family shingle—the brush kit was my dad’s and he bought it from an older Clovis for three dollars fifty the day after my grandfather fell. My dad shined for ten years, taught me to do the same, then died on his way home one night with the kit in his hand. His heart, Doctor Fessenden said.
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Published: Jun 6, 2011
Length: 16 minutes (4,192 words)
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Longreads Pick
[Fiction] Almost every morning, as Lyle was getting ready to take the dog for a walk along the bay, his wife would ask, “Are ye down the prom, then?” They had met and married thirty years before, in Vermont, when she was Mary Curtin and he’d thought her a happy combination of exotic and domestic. At sixty, after their life in the States, she still called herself a Galway girl; at sixty-seven, after two years of retirement in Galway, Lyle still considered a prom a high school dance, not two miles of sidewalk beside the water.
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Published: Feb 1, 1999
Length: 21 minutes (5,492 words)
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Fiction
When he thinks about the people he’s known in his life, a good many of them seem to have cultivated some curious strand of asceticism, contrived some gesture of renunciation. They give up sugar. Or meat. Or newspapers. Or neckties. They sell their second car or disconnect the television. They might make a point of staying at home on Sunday evenings or abjuring chemical sprays. Something anyway, that signals dissent and cuts across the beating heart of their circumstances, reminding them of their other, leaner selves. Their better selves.
“Mirrors.” — Carol Shields, Prairie, Pen/O. Henry Prize — 1996
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