The Mumpsimus

In The New Yorker , Parul Sehgal writes that the "invocation of trauma promises access to some well-guarded bloody chamber; increasingly, though, we feel as if we have entered a rather generic motel room, with all the signs of heavy turnover."  I am generally sympathetic to Sehgal's complaints here about the ways "trauma" has saturated so many narratives — I've been grumpy about this imprecise, all-encompassing, self-justifying, shallow use of the term "trauma" for at least a decade now, ever since I was introduced to the world of "trauma studies" in literary theory, a field I was particularly suspicious of because, among other things, it didn't seem to understand how fiction works. One way trauma has been deployed has been to indicate Seriousness in novels, a move I've perhaps been especially repulsed by because I find a lot of Very Serious Novels very very uninteresting . However, for me, Sehgal's outcry is simultaneou...

While canonical literary history has generally told the story of 20th Century British fiction as the story of men, with some exemplary women here and there, we have enough distance now to see that while the men were certainly the grabbers of headlines and awards, their canonicity was less a matter of merit than of their control of the culture industry. The men ate up all the air in the rooms of litchat. Meanwhile, by and large it was women who wrote the fiction that has survived the years the best, and which remains most readable and interesting today. This is especially true around midcentury, where we can speak of Rebecca West (1892-1983), Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893-1978), Naomi Mitchison (1897-1999), Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973), Anna Kavan (1901-1968), Stevie Smith (1902-1971 [best known as a poet, but author of 3 interesting novels]), Leonora Carrington (1917-2011), Muriel Spark (1918-2006), Iris Murdoch (1919-1999), Doris Lessing (1919-2013) — and many others, both well-know...

With one post, Larry Nolen simultaneously offers a thoughtful and well-informed response to folks who got all "wwaaaahhrrr!  waaaahhhhrrr!  genre good!  waaahhhhrrrr!" about the New Yorker's "20 Under 40" promotional list (whereas I just offered snark ) and he proves what we already knew -- that he was the perfect successor as Best American Fantasy series editor, because his perspective is exactly the one we wanted for the book when we created the series (and he's a much faster reader than I am, which will make the work perhaps a bit less arduous for him than it was for me).  It's a post well worth reading -- one of the things being inundated with piles of lit mags does is show you the extraordinary variety of writing out there, both in terms of content and form. Now if I can just get him to stop calling it "mimetic fiction" , I'll have achieved all of my goals for world domination, bwahahahahahahahaaaa! Update: The link for "...

20 Young Writers Earn the Envy of Many Others Yes, New York Times Headline Writer , my envy is vast!  It contains multitudes!  Well, not quite multitudes.  More like twenty little sharp needles of bitter, concentrated envy.   Why why why New Yorker elitists didn't you pick ME ?!?  I coulda been a contender!   You know I'm out here, because I write to you every week to tell you how wrong you were to never publish a story by David Eddings ! Clearly, the only thing your editors appreciate are boring realistic stories about middle-aged professors who have affairs.  Like the stories by Daniel Alarcón and Chris Adrian in Best American Fantasy .   And Sarah Shun-lien Bynum's Madeleine Is Sleeping .  And the title story of Wells Towers's Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned .  And all of Karen Russell's stories , certainly.  Dirty realists!  Nasty rotten winning smug literary brats!  Baaaaaaah!  ...