The Mumpsimus

Littleton Opera House, Littleton, NH c.1900, a location in the story I have a new story — my first (but not last) of this year — now available on the Conjunctions website— "The Last Vanishing Man" . This one's a bit of a departure for me, in that it is a serious story that will not, I'm told, make you want to kill yourself after you read it. In fact, one of my primary goals when writing it was to write something not entirely nihilistic. Various people have, over the years, gently suggested that perhaps I might try writing a ... well ... a nice story now and then. (I actually think I've only written one story that is not nice, "Patrimony" in Black Static last year . And maybe "On the Government of the Living" . Well, maybe "How Far to Englishman's Bay" , too. And— okay, I get it...) So "The Last Vanishing Man" is a story that has an (at least somewhat) uplifting ending, and the good people triumph, or at leas...

Alice Sheldon was born 100 years ago today, which means that in a certain sense, James Tiptree, Jr. is 100, because Sheldon wrote under that name. Yet James Tiptree, Jr. wasn't really born until 1968, when the first Tiptree story, "Birth of a Salesman", appeared in the March issue of Analog . Nonetheless, we can and should celebrate Sheldon's centenary. She's primarily remembered for Tiptree, of course, but as Julie Phillips so deftly showed in her biography , Sheldon's life was far more than just that byline. I've written about Tiptree a lot over the years, though nothing recently, as other work has taken me in other directions. In honor of Alice Sheldon's birthday, here are some of the things I've written in the past— In "The Stories That Predict Us" , I wrote about discovering Tiptree at an early age. I reviewed the selected Tiptree stories, Her Smoke Rose Up Forever , for SF Site in 2005 . (It's a joint review with th...

It was time I had a website under my own name, and not just this here Mumpsimus. After all, I am more than a mumpsimus! Or so I tell myself. Thus: matthewcheney.net ! Because my book of short stories is coming out in January, the focus of the site is my fiction more than anything else. At the moment, there's nothing there that isn't also here, aside from some pictures. But I'm sure I'll figure out something unique to host there in the coming weeks, months, years...

The universe has conspired to turn my research work this summer into mass culture — while I've been toiling away on a fellowship that has me investigating Virginia Woolf's reading in the 1930s and the literary culture of the decade, the mini-series Life in Squares ,  about the Bloomsbury group and Woolf's family, played on the BBC and the film Testament of Youth , based on Vera Brittain's 1933 memoir of her experiences during World War One, played in cinemas. I've now seen both and have mixed feelings about them, though I enjoyed watching each. Life in Squares  offers some good acting and excellent production design, though it never really adds up to much;  Testament of Youth  is powerful and well constructed, even as it falls into some clichés of the WWI movie genre, and it's well worth seeing for its lead performance.  The two productions got me thinking about what we want from biographical movies and tv shows, how we evaluate them, and how they're...

There are lots of reasons that the University of New Hampshire , where I'm currently working toward a Ph.D. in Literature , should be in the news. It's a great school, with oodles of marvelous faculty and students doing all sorts of interesting things. Like any large institution, it's got its problems (I personally think the English Department is underappreciated by the Powers That Be, and that the university as a whole is not paying nearly enough attention to the wonderful programs that don't fall under that godawful acronym-of-the-moment STEM , but of course I'm biased...) Whatever the problems, though, I've been very happy at the university, and I'm proud to be associated with it. But Donald Trump and Fox News or somebody discovered a guide to inclusive language gathering dust in a corner of the UNH website and decided that this was worth denouncing as loudly as possible, and from there it spread all over the world . The UNH administration, of cours...

As a little addendum to my post about the somewhat narrow aesthetics of Ben Marcus's New American Stories  anthology, let me point you to Nick Mamatas's "Anti-Fragile" , a story that does pretty much everything I was hoping to find somewhere in New American Stories  and didn't. On Twitter, I said: Had enough of shallow stories told in short sentences & bite-sized paragraphs? Feast on "Anti-Fragile" by @NMamatas http://t.co/R28zqR5l2f — Matthew Cheney (@melikhovo) July 27, 2015 And that about sums up my feelings. Well, also: I may be partial, as I am an avowed and longstanding lover of long sentences , and this story is a wonderfully skilled, thrillingly long sentence. It's well worth reading and thinking about.

Ben Marcus's 2004 anthology The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories  is a wonderfully rich collection for a book of its type. I remember first reading it with all the excitement of discovery — even the stories I didn't like seemed somehow invigorating in the way they made me dislike them. I've used the book with a couple of classes I've taught, and I've recommended it to many people. I was overjoyed, then, when I heard that Marcus was doing a follow up, and I got it as soon as I could: New American Stories . I started reading immediately. Expectations can kill us. The primary emotion I felt while reading New American Stories  was disappointment. It's not that the stories are bad — they aren't — but that the book as a whole felt a bit narrow, a bit repetitive. I skipped around from story to story, dashing in search of surprise, but it was rare. I tried to isolate the source of my disappointment, of my lack of surprise: Was it the subject matter? ...