ach week The New Yorkerest blog would send forth an enigmatic post with a link to the article in that week’s New Yorker that s/he had liked the most. However, since the beginning of the year the blog has gone into hibernation, so I thought that I’d have a go at taking over.
I have found in the past that my selections are quite different to those on the NYest, perhaps longtime readers of that blog will notice!
I’ll put entries in separate posts, from the beginning of the year—keep your eyes (and RSS readers) peeled.
hort stories, by their nature, leave a lot unsaid. Perhaps writers who don’t make it in the short story line, but are very good novelists fail to understand the balance that is required between how much the reader wants to know and how much you ought to tell them. In Jonathan Lethem’s short story from this week’s New Yorker, we are left with a lot to wonder about, and by giving us more information, Lethem only increases the number of questions that we have. This is one of the ways to tell a good shorty, to leave open uncharted areas in the map of the scenario you are creating and to make the map bigger with each sentence you write. But those parts that are coloured in need to pull the reader along so that we compelled to imagine the uncharted territory.
‘m interested in the inner mental life of individuals — in what is in our minds when we encounter the various situations that we find ourselves in. This perhaps goes some way to describing my research area; in a very austere way I am trying to describe what goes on in people’s minds when they are using a particular type of expression.
It also explains why I like some of the writers that I like; Proust, Richard Ford and Vladimir Nabokov come to mind in this regard*.
