Eric D. Lehman
Niels Lyhne
by Jens Peter Jacobsen (trans. Tiina Nunnelly; Penguin, 2006)
Niels Lyhne is one of those forgotten masterpieces that, when he finds it, a reader cannot believe he or the rest of humanity has gotten along without. I found Jacobsen through Rainer Maria Rilke’s letters, not knowing that the nineteenth-century Danish writer had also found admirers in Thomas Mann, Herman Hesse, James Joyce, Sigmund Freud, August Strindberg, T.E. Lawrence—the list goes on. This small novel influenced a whole generation of European thinkers and writers to an extraordinary extent. And rightfully so. Here is a book in which, as Rilke says, “there is nothing that does not seem to have been understood, held, lived, and known in memory’s wavering echo.”
Niels Lyhne is also a book about belief, about a poetic soul feeling its way through an ordinary life. The eponymous protagonist falls deeply in love, only to disagree with his lifelong love on the subject of faith. He struggles with these questions, right up to the point of death, when his friend tells him, “Opinions are only to live by—in life they can do some good, but what does it matter whether you die with one opinion or another?” Yet, to Niels it does matter, and he dies what Jacobsen calls “the difficult death.”
One apprehends in this book the seeds of the great works of the early twentieth century: Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Mann’s The Magic Mountain, Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, and all of Hesse’s earlier works to name only a few. In a way, these books seem less original, more reflections of Jacobsen’s effort, after reading it. Of course, these later novels may be greater and more developed in some ways. But after reading this lost classic, it becomes clear that they could not have existed without the brilliant, haunting Niels Lyhne.
Eric D. Lehman is an English professor at the University of Bridgeport.
Bennett Lovett-Graff
Listen Here! This Week: Raymond Carver and F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Listen Here! Short Story Reading Series gets off the ground this week with its first readings at Willoughby’s Coffee & Tea at 194 York Street, at 7 p.m.
Our theme?
“What Did She See in Him?”
Our stories?
Raymond Carver’s “Fat” and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Jelly-Bean”
Why these?
“Why not” would be too glib an answer. First and foremost, they’re really good.
Second, did I mention that they’re good?
“Fat” is one of Raymond Carver’s finest tales. In the tradition of Carson McCullers’ Ballad of the Sad Cafe, it takes what would otherwise be a classic sideshow freak and turns one customer’s gastronomic compulsion into a story of salvation for the waitress who must serve that compulsion. It’s a tale marked by the quiet bittersweetness and powerful subtextual currents that typify all of Carver’s stories.
Fitzgerald’s “The Jelly-Bean” was published in the October 1920 issue of Metropolitan Magazine and was later collected in Six Tales of the Jazz Age. This classic short story wonderful captures a generation’s embrace of the imminent freedoms promised by the Roaring Twenties, but not without pain and wasted possibility. Sympathy and pathos mix liberally in a story about a time when both were so deeply needed after the terribleness of the Great War.
Bennett Lovett-Graff
Literary Curmudgeonism
OK, call me lazy, but I’m reposting something I had written once upon a time for my personal blog and still find to be the case, not that currency always justifies repetition. But, in this instance, I’m making an exception.
Once, while I sat schmoozing in the home of New Haven Review editor Mark Oppenheimer, we started speaking of our respective experiences as college instructors. He noted how much he preferred teaching nonfiction writing to literature because he neither wrote nor knew all that much about literary criticism—a gross understatement on his part, really. I chimed in, stupidly perhaps, “I don’t really understand why we teach students how to write literary criticism at all.”
But is such a sentiment all that stupid? In spirit of making a go of this bit of devilish advocacy, I thus ask: why do we teach students how to write literary criticism? Make no mistake, it is a type of writing that can approach the status of art in the right hands. But even for experts it is a far more difficult form of nonfiction to produce—in my humble view—than those ol’ classroom chesnuts: narration, description, and argumentation.
Now, technically, literary criticism is a subdivision of the last, but it remains one of the hardest to do well. I attribute this difficulty not only to the inability of students to read and write well but to the inherent complications of trying to formulate an argument about something as slippery as a well-wrought story or poem.
In my experience, the slipperiness of the literary artifact comes directly from the story-like nature of this species of discourse. When I taught the art of litcrit—and probably not all that well, to be honest—my students continuously wrestled with the Herculean (or more likely Sisyphean) task of unwinding authors from characters, storytellers from their stories, the telling from the showing. Even I still have difficulty with the boxes-within-boxes or wall-of-mirrors (pick your metaphor) nature of this discursive mode. And, mind you, I have a doctorate in literature.
I’m currently convinced that high school teachers and college professors teach students how to write literary criticism not because it instructs them in how to “think critically” or “formulate an argument” better. These can be done just as easily—actually more easily—focusing on more seemingly concrete topics, like reproductive rights or drunk-driving laws. Instead, I believe many teachers, in their heart of hearts, would rather not teach students how to write literary criticism at all. What they’d prefer is reading works of literary quality and talking about them intelligently—like a book club but with the teacher’s authority intact for guiding novitiates. That certainly was my experience as a college instructor.
I loved selecting, teaching, and discussing (or more appropriately discoursing on) the work at hand. What I despised to no end was marking my students’ papers, which were poorly written, generally incoherent, and pretty pedestrian in their interpretations. And most literary instructors I speak with tend to echo this sentiment—although I’m happy to be flamed to the contrary.
Marking papers probably explains why I became an editor: I grew tired of commenting on people’s dry runs. If someone is going to write poorly, and I’m going to have to redline it into readable prose, I might as well make sure the fruits of my labor see light of day in published form.
In some ways, I miss those halcyon days of teaching literature. I even sometimes miss the stress and strain of writing literary criticism—no easy task, even for me. But the idea of teaching students to write literary criticism, as if that constituted training for a profession other than, well, writing literary criticism (which is not even a solid basis for the art of book reviewing), is a misbegotten notion that serves no one else other than the instructors who recognize this chore as the price they must pay for the pleasures of reading and discussing literature worth talking about.
Donald Brown
Adventures in the Word Trade
The reality is that not everyone can be a doctor, not everyone can be a professional athlete, and not everyone can be a writer. You may be a precious snowflake, but if you can’t express your individuality in sterling prose, I don’t want to read about it.
–Ted Genoways, “The Death of Fiction?” in Mother Jones Jan/Feb 2010
Here Ted Genoways, editor of The Virginia Quarterly Review, expresses his mission statement, so to speak, a way of turning aside submissions he simply doesn’t want or have time to read. We might ask ourselves if this, in itself, is “sterling prose,” and wonder why we should read it if it’s not. Two matters make this less than “sterling,” in my view, and I’d like to point them out as a means to talk about what we talk about when we talk about writing.
One problem is the speciousness of the analogies: a doctor becomes a doctor by going through considerable training and vetting; an athlete — which is something “anyone” can be — only becomes a professional athlete by getting paid, and continuing to get paid, to play a sport. The “anyone” here, to be an athlete, is anyone who puts in the time to train, has talent, drive, and what is generically called “athletic ability.” Granted, some may wish they had it, but really don’t. It’s assumed that everyone who is a professional athlete has some ability — though their detractors and anti-fans may deny it vehemently.
Is writing really like either of these things? Not really, and here’s why. Anyone, literally, can be a writer, so long as he or she is literate. Children are encouraged to be athletic but they don’t fail school if they aren’t (I know whereof I speak on this one). But they really aren’t supposed to graduate without being able to write. Therefore, they are writers, potentially.
Genoways doesn’t say “professional writer” because he knows that wouldn’t help his argument. The pay scale for poetry and much literary writing is so low that people who are professional writers — journalists, mostly, but also celebrities who write books, or who become celebrities by writing books — would hesitate to call them professionals. And everyone who considers him or herself a literary writer knows this. Many, possibly most, are not trying to become “professional writers” in that sense. Certainly, most want to be published writers and most would like to be paid for their writing, and would like to sell their books, but many of the people submitting to literary journals are “amateurs” if we define “professional” as “getting paid to write.” Many literary figures, some quite respected, make their livings by something other than writing.
Genoways is well aware of this and so the “professional athlete” analogy really doesn’t work, but he wants to differentiate between sheer ability or doing it for love of the game, and being an athlete paid to compete. But pay isn’t really the issue when it comes to writing, even if VQR pays. If it were they’d only accept submissions from agents, who are getting paid to make sure their authors make money.
The doctor analogy doesn’t work at all, not even really for academic writers, who also don’t get paid (much or always) for their writing, though they are expected to produce it. Not everyone can become a Ph.D.,we might say, but, if you do become one, you now have a credential that gives you authority to conduct research and comment on research in that field. You may or may not get paid for that; as with many writers, your real pay, what makes you professional, comes from teaching. A doctor, generally, gets paid for practicing medicine, making him, maybe, a bit like the freelance writer, but one rarely hears of someone being a doctor “on the side.”
Getting paid for writing may be difficult, in part, because anyone can be a writer. And though Genoways might like to think that being an editor for a respected journal is comparable to those who hand out degrees in medicine or those who hire athletes, it isn’t really. An editor of such a journal is given the task of deciding, from all that it is submitted and solicited, what suits the journal, what fits with what. Some of that may come from people with credentials, some of it not. Some from students in MFA programs, some from their teachers, some from people who wouldn’t go near such a thing. Or it may come only from whomever the editor knows and is in contact with.
If not published by VQR, the writing might still find a home somewhere, and if published somewhere, it may claim some at least minimal credit as published. And that’s really the only point in Genoways’ prose that stands: his statement of his own tastes as an editor. If it’s not sterling prose, don’t send it, he’s not interested. Someone else may be. And so, while the person Genoways rejects is, in his scheme of things, not a writer, it may be that the person really is, and maybe even a professional one.
So what of Genoways’ prose? Do you not find that bit about the “precious snowflake” cloying? Does anyone really want to read writers who are considered or consider themselves precious snowflakes? Genoways goes for the cheap laugh — oh, yes, Ted, we know that type, how rough it must be to read such poseurs.
But then he doesn’t say (which would make me be with him more): if you cannot write sterling prose, I don’t want to read you. Fine. But no, he says “if you cannot express your individuality in sterling prose,” which gives the game away: “express your individuality” is not sterling prose (at this point, I think “sterling prose” is rather less than sterling), but seems a concession to the language of that “precious snowflake.” But why? To say that the “sterling” expression of individuality will trump the “precious” expression of individuality? If so, it leads us to believe that the expression of individuality is what Genoways is after, when the point he seems most passionate about is decrying the protracted navel-gazing of American fiction writers who don’t seem to know or care that there’s a war or a world or a world war going on.
If Genoways, as editor, were reading Genoways’ essay, well, let’s just say it might not make the cut.
Eva Geertz
Slow Mail, the Letter Writers Alliance, and My Cousin Down the Street
One of my favorite people in New Haven is my second cousin Andy, who happens to live two blocks away from us, down the street, with his wife, Karen. Lest you think this is all about how wonderfully tight-knit my family is, and how great it is we live so near to one another, blah blah blah, let me jump right in and say that it sounds that way, but in fact, it’s not true, and the reality is weirder. Andy grew up in Chicago and I never even met him until I was 25 years old. He moved to New Haven about four years ago because of Karen, who, it turns out, grew up just outside of New Haven. But they met in Ann Arbor and courted there, and as for their winding up living two blocks away, that was a total fluke. Karen landed a job in Westport, and rents there were so high that they chose to live in New Haven instead. And the nicest apartment they saw, when they were looking around, was on my street. So heigh-ho, here’s my cousin Andy and his wife Karen, and we see them all the time, and believe you me, our parents are all thrilled. It’s very cozy.
Andy and Karen are completely brilliant and wonderful people and they prove it to me on a fairly frequent basis, the most recent of which was when Andy suggested that there be created a Slow Mail movement, akin to the Slow Food movement. As someone who has pontificated at some length about the glory of letter writing, and how sad it is we don’t do it more, I glommed onto this right away, of course. (I’m sure Mark Oppenheimer would too — I seem to recall hearing his NPR-friendly voice over NPR airwaves recently talking about this very subject.) Andy posted a status line on Facebook saying something along the lines of “Hey: Slow Mail. Anyone else think this is a great idea?” And he generated more than a few comments, among them someone’s suggesting that he do a Google search for something called the Letter Writers Alliance.
Well, I don’t know if Andy ever did that Google search, but I sure as hell did, and within an hour I’d convinced myself to join the organization. If you go to http://www.16sparrows.com/shop/Letter-Writers-Alliance.html then you too can join the LWA. It doesn’t cost a lot of money, which is good, because it’s kind of a silly thing to do, but boy, when I got my packet in the mail from them, I thought, “This is worth every penny.”
The LWA was founded by some stationers who make what they describe as “greetings cards for sarcastic, quirky folks.” (That phrase along made me desperately wish that I was still the buyer for Atticus; how I would have loved to put these cards on display.) So they’ve got a lot of snarky cards, which are way fun (if, all right, not for everybody), and clever stationery designs, and then they’ve got the LWA, which has a mission statement as follows:
“In this era of instantaneous communication, a handwritten letter is a rare and wondrous item. The Letter Writers Alliance is dedicated to preserving this art form; neither long lines, nor late deliveries, nor increasing postal rates will keep us from our mission.
As a member of the Letter Writers Alliance, you will carry on the glorious cultural tradition of letter writing. You will take advantage of every opportunity to send tangible correspondence. Prepare your pen and paper, moisten your tongue, and get ready to write more letters!”
I have several friends who gave up Facebook for Lent. One of them, a guy who lives in Idaho, sent me a Facebook message about two weeks before Lent began, asking if I would write to him, on paper, during Lent. I said, “Of course!” I did, using LWA stationery. I admit that I didn’t use a fountain pen, but even so, it was a pleasure.
Donald Brown
Connect at the Cabaret, Old Chum
It’s Valentine’s Day (aka VD). Maybe you’ve got it covered with your favorite mating personage, your significant other(s), your steady, your squeeze, your spouse (or the person who would be that if the laws of the land permitted), but … maybe not, maybe you’re looking to connect, somehow, someway.
Maybe you turn to craigslist, home of the online hookup, or maybe you’re not quite ready to go virtual yet, so you look at “Missed Connections” hoping against hope that someone out there, someone whose path you’ve already crossed — in line at Subway, at the bank, on that same path you walk every day to class, on the subway — is desperately seeking you again, to get your digits, your screenname, the key to your city . . .
Chad Raines, of the local band The Simple Pleasure, has concocted the music, lyrics and book for Missed Connections, a guilty pleasure based on online personals, up for its final showing today at Yale Cabaret, and it’s a blast of sound, movement, and cagey, collective jeering at the pathetic losers we all risk being when we’re lookin’ for love, or, if not love exactly, then at least that special someone who will let you massage his or her feet …
Pick your favorite moment: the phys ed girl, suffering from diarrhea, pining for the guy who will examine her stool (how much more intimate does it get?), or the guy at the Subway, intoning, in a hilarious Barry White take-off, how he noticed that girl in line with him, but was scared off when she ordered for two; or the gent with binoculars who likes to watch his neighbor take out her trash; or the pissed-off, stood-up woman who gives us a lesson in etiquette: if you’re married and seeking discreet connection on the side, it’s just not cool to be a no-show to someone else who’s married and seeking same … there might even be a sitter’s fee involved!
The songs are high volume and extremely active. Jennifer Harrison Newman once again choreographs the impossibly small “stage”at the Cabaret — including a line dance, led by Raines, that’s so close you might catch a spray of sweat. Director Christopher Mirto keeps the show loose and juicy, but also cheerily inviting — it feels at times like we’re at “dating camp” and the cast are our counselors, trying to get us out of our shells.
There’s never a dull moment because you never know what’s coming next — erotic tableaus, condoms flung to the crowd, a get-up and boogie number with lyrics shouting “woman for woman, man for man” rather than “celebrate good times, c’mon!”
And who knows, when it’s over there might even be a line on craigslist for you: You were at Yale Cab last weekend with some bozo and/or bimbo you clearly weren’t that into. I was the ____ with the ______. Hope to see you there in two weeks (Feb 25-27) when the Yale Cab will feature Radio Station, inspired by the work of Shogo Ohta and the Pacific Performance Project/East. Come alone, if you dare…
Missed Connections
a new musical by Chad Aaron Raines
directed by Christopher Mirto
Special Valentine’s Performance! Sunday Feb 14 @ 8pm
How you gonna meet your missed connection?
Eva Geertz
John Thorne Doesn’t Live in California
If you’re not interested in food skip this piece.
No, I take that back. You don’t have to be interested in food as in Food. What I want is people who like to eat. Do you like to eat? Good, then keep reading.
Everyone talks about Alice Waters. Alice Waters this, Alice Waters that. Berkeley is Heaven (unless you’re Caitlin Flanagan, in which case it seems to be a special circle of hell, and I don’t know why she doesn’t move to the East Coast, but there it is). Fa la la la la la. I’m tired of it, and I am really damned tired of reading proclamations on food and eating from someone who just can’t seem to get it that most of the country does not live in Berkeley, California. I know I’m not the only person who’s got serious Alice Waters Fatigue. So for those of you who like to eat, and to Eat, and who like food and Food, and who like reading about it, let me make a recommendation. I promise I’m not about to tell you to read Michael Pollan.
Please go read any book by John Thorne.
I know he gets reviewed sometimes Big Places and I’m always so thrilled for him. The food magazines have always sung his praises. But at the same time, not once in my life have I ever talked to someone who knew who he was. I’ve never had someone idly look at my bookshelves and see all the John Thorne and go, “Oh, you like him too?”
I had no idea who John Thorne was until I read Laurie Colwin (sorry to bring up her name again, but it’s true); in one of her cookbooks she mentions a pumpkin tian that he wrote about. I have no interest in eating pumpkin so I didn’t really think about John Thorne again until several years later when I was browsing in a bookstore (why do I remember this? it was Atticus) while coming down with a cold. On a whim I bought Thorne’s Simple Cooking, and while nursing my cold at home I read the book from cover to cover and could not believe how incredibly good it was.
I mean not that it was an incredibly useful and informative cookbook — which it is — but that it was just so well written. John Thorne is, hands down, in my top five American writers writing today. But nobody reads him except diehard foodies (as far as I can tell). Even though he’s smart and opinionated and reasonable and funny and wonderful. Even though the books are beautifully designed, about as appealing as books can be (all published, I think, by Farrar, Straus, Giroux, and designed by Jonathan Lippincott, who’s from New Haven by the way; Lippincott has designed some of the most handsome books in my recent memory, and Thorne’s are right up there)…
One of the great things — the noble things — about John Thorne is that he writes about food that is born out of and meant to be eaten in climates harsher than the Bay Area. Thorne currently lives in Maine, I believe (or maybe the Berkshires, I can’t remember now); he’s writing always about food for cold climates. Food in places that really do have four very distinct seasons, maybe even plus mud season. Which is a totally different thing from what Alice Waters is always pontificating about, which is food in what would be for most of us a seriously alternate reality. John Thorne’s reality is much more like mine. It’s sloppy. It’s not really very virtuous. It’s not about having truffles on hand at all times, or mincing about talking about the divine walnut oil I found in the South of France. It’s about buying a bag of beans because it’s cheap and then figuring out the best way to make the best damn meal out of it (his chapter on baked beans — oh, how I love it, almost as much as I love baked beans). Foodies who are in New Haven ought to read John Thorne, for sure, but foodies everywhere who want an antidote for Alice Waters Fatigue (not recognized by the DSM-V, but maybe in future editions) should please go find his books.
Simple Cooking
Outlaw Cook
Serious Pig
Pot on the Fire
Mouth Wide Open
Donald Brown
What’s in a Word?
Meyer Levin, a writer best-known for his novel Compulsion, the story of the Leopold-Loeb murder and trial, wanted to be known as the man who wrote a play based on the diary of Anne Frank. He met with Otto Frank to discuss that possibility before Anne’s book had even been published in the U.S.
But the task of writing a play from the diary went to the Hollywood screenwriting team of Hackett/Goodrich, and their play won a Pulitzer Prize. In Levin’s view, their play succeeded by downplaying the overt Jewish elements in Anne Frank’s story, universalizing it into a tale of unjust suffering and a young girl’s moral insight. Levin himself called his effort to present a more authentic theatrical version of Anne Frank an obsession.
Rinne Groff’s new play, Compulsion, opened Thursday in its debut at the Yale Repertory, directed by Oskar Eustis, artistic director of The Public Theater, which, along with Berkeley Repertory, commissioned the play. The play recreates Levin’s struggle — fictionalized in the person of Sid Silver and incarnated on stage by a bristling, touchy, sincere, sarcastic, soulfully suffering, and at one memorable moment, light-heartedly soft-shoeing Mandy Patinkin.
But the title, in opting for Levin’s word “compulsion,” used to characterize what drove Leopold and Loeb to murder, rather than Levin’s word “obsession,” chosen for his autobiographical account of his struggle with the Anne Frank material, indicates the problem the play presents us with. It suggests that Silver is not righteously obsessed — as one might be with an injustice, trying to alter a situation that nags at one — but rather under a compulsion, as one might be when neurotically driven to certain behavior, such as having to repeat the same lesson over and over.
Both things might be true, and it’s up to the audience how far they go along with Silver in his crusade, first, to be the one who makes a play of the diary, and, when that hope must finally be relinquished, to get recognition that the Hackett/Goodrich play stole from his, then to mount a staging of his play (though he had signed away any right to do so) to show that his play is, as a friend says, “the more important play.”
Groff’s play is fast-moving, enough, in these arguments over Silver’s play — though they rely on an interest in show biz that all viewers may not share. Silver’s character is further fleshed out by his life with his French wife (Hannah Cabell), a writer herself, who offers a few erotically charged moments and also provides moral support, until driven to almost suicidal despair by her husband’s obsession. At that point, just before intermission, the drama between the two becomes the greater focus of the play, though the figure of Anne stills presents its fascination.
In what may be the play’s most memorable scene, Anne, rendered as a marionette, appears in bed beside Mrs. Silver to discuss her husband. The scene stages the triangulation among Silver, his wife, and Anne, and further complicates the relation via Silver’s identification with Otto Frank. Anne, voiced in this scene by Patinkin, expresses the pathos of her father, a man Silver excoriated for betraying their beloved Anne after her death.
Compulsion’s use of marionettes — not only for Anne, but also for scenes from the two different plays based on her book — is a brilliant idea that occurred to Groff when she learned that Levin had once worked in puppet theater. The marionette of Anne allows the play to convey Anne’s indeterminate age in the present — is she the age she was when she died, or the age she would be had she lived? The marionette also registers the extent to which Anne Frank has become “a puppet” of her representations, and, thus, no longer a flesh and blood entity.
Ultimately the play’s theme is the question of whether Silver’s cause is important for Jewish identity, as he insists, or whether it is simply a personal matter involving his obsession with Anne and what she suffered. (In real life, Levin was a war correspondent who did see firsthand the horror of the Nazi camps, and it was his review of The Diary of a Young Girl in the New York Times that was pivotal in catapulting it to bestseller status — both attributes are retained for Silver, so we do see him as a man to be taken seriously.)
The script makes Silver more of a wordsmith than he perhaps has a right to be — using coinages such as “cash cow” and “in the loop” in the Fifties, a decade or two before they had become common currency. Though it has more than a few entertaining exchanges, the play offers little in the way of dramatic reversals, recognitions, or romantic complications to add entertainment to what is essentially a hard-luck show biz tale.
At yet the play is more compelling than a tale of someone passed over on the road to fame and glory, and that’s because of the figure of Anne Frank. But we have to be willing to see the meaning of the Holocaust as implicated in her cultural status, and, as Silver insists, in the fate of his play. But again it seems more fitting to highlight Silver’s obsession with Anne and what she represents, rather than his compulsion to insist on that relation.
COMPULSION
By RINNE GROFF
Directed by OSKAR EUSTIS
Featuring HANNAH CABELL, MANDY PATINKIN, STEPHEN BARKER TURNER
January 29 to February 28, 2010
Yale Repertory Theatre
1120 Chapel Street
A co-production with The Public Theater and Berkeley Repertory Theatre
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Listen Here, Spring 2010 Season
The Arts Council of Greater New Haven, New Haven Review, and New Haven Theater Company are pleased to announce the return of Listen Here, the weekly short story reading series in which actors from the New Haven Theater Company read short stories chosen by New Haven Review editors.
The spring Listen Here series will take place on Tuesday evenings, from 7:00 to 8:00 p.m., with reading occurring on a rotating basis at Willoughby’s Coffee & Tea (194 York Street), Lulu: A European Coffee House (49 Cottage Street), Bru Cafe (141 Orange Street), and Manjares Fine Pastries (838 Whalley Avenue, on the corner of West Rock Avenue).
Willoughby’s Coffee & Tea
March 9: What Did She See in Him?
Raymond Carver, “Fat”
F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Jelly-Bean”
Lulu: A European Coffee House
March 16: Short Cuts
I.B. Singer, “Why the Geese Shrieked”
Jamaica Kincaid, “Girl”
John Cheever, “Reunion”
Annie Proulx, “The Blood Bay”
Bru Cafe
March 23: Breaking Up is Hard to Do
Bobbie Ann Mason, “Shiloh”
Bernard Malamud, “The Jewbird”
Manjares Fine Pastries
March 30: Straight Shooters
Stephen Crane, “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky”
Tobias Wolff, “Hunters in the Snow”
Willoughby’s Coffee & Tea
April 6: Take Me Out to the Ball Game
James Thurber, “You Could Look it Up”
James Farrell, “My Grandmother Goes to Comiskey Park”
Lulu: A European Coffee House
April 13: Something’s Not Right
T.C. Boyle, “Bloodfall”
Shirley Jackson, “The Lottery”
Bru Cafe
April 20: L’Etranger
Isidoro Blaistein, “Uncle Facundo”
John Cheever, “The Swimmer”
Manjares Fine Pastries
April 27: For Shame
Lorrie Moore, “Control Group”
Toni Cade Bambera, “The Lesson”
Willoughby’s Coffee & Tea
May 4: Lovesick
Jhumpa Lahiri, “A Temporary Matter”
Lydia Peele, “Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing”
Lulu: A European Coffee House
May 11: Animal Crackers
Edgar Allan Poe, “The Black Cat”
Annie Proulx, “The Half-Skinned Steer”
Bru Cafe
May 18: Brothers
Louise Erdrich, “The Red Convertible”
David Sedaris, “You Can’t Kill the Rooster”
Manjares Fine Pastries
May 25: Romeos & Juliets
Louise Erdrich, “The Plague of Doves”
Wiliam Faulkner, “A Rose for Emily”
The Publisher
New Haven Review
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Weasel Coffee Lovers
Followers of this site will have no doubt come across the occasional wonderful article we have had from New Haven journalist and writer Robert McGuire. Every so often Robert heads off with his wife to Vietnam, their sojourn to which he chronicle at www.weaselcoffeelovers.com.
We like Robert, and his blog postings on Vietnam are thoughtful disquisitions on the daily life in this region of far East Asia where so much American treasure and blood was consumed. To that end, we think it more than worthwhile for our readers to take the trip over there and see, from the perspective of a New Haven writer, this remarkable region of the world.
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New Haven Review