Jorge Luis Borges, Karen Joy Fowler, Clarice Lispector, Thom Jones: Short Story Wednesday (one might be a memoir) on Thursday (just my speed)

Outsiders

"Doctor Brodie's Report" by Jorge Luis Borges (as translated by Norman Thomas DiGiovanni and Borges, originally <<El informe de Brodie>>),  The Atlantic Monthly, January 1971, edited by Robert Manning; perhaps more easily read in the collection Doctor Brodie's Report, the Bantam paperback edition, posted for student use

"The Hen" and "The Smallest Woman in the World" by Clarice Lispector (as translated by Elizabeth Bishop), as first published, with "Marmosets" in Kenyon Review, Summer 1964, edited by Robie Macauley (and all three can be read at the KR site with a free registration, or paid subscription)

"The Last Worders" by Karen Joy Fowler, Lady Churchill's Rosebud  Wristlet, June 2007 (issue 20), edited by Gavin Grant and Kelly Link; also can be read in the June 2019 issue of Lightspeed, edited by John Joseph Adams (and in Rich Horton's and also in Ellen Datlow and Grant and Link's best fantasy-fiction of the year annuals for 2008)

"Cannonball: Love Sinks" by Thom Jones, The Washington Post Magazine, 11 July 2004, edited by Leonard Downie, Jr.

Writers do tend to be outsiders to at least some degree, of course, observers of the lives of others and themselves, sometimes even accurately. I read this essay from Vulture recently, Lili Anolik's take on her relation to Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, whom she wrote a book about, and Donna Tartt and her fellow students in the Class of '86 at Bennington College, most famously Jonathan Lethem and B. E. Ellis, whom she'd produced a podcast series about (an extension of this long essay in Eaquire). As usual with Vulture, a mix of gossipy biographical details and useful insights on how all these women she admires have made their way through the world. Anolik seeks, she notes, to get at the truth about these folks even if her subjects aren't so fond of what she discusses. Also, that sells.

So it can go with fiction-writers as well...Jorge Luis Borges was raised in relatively comfortable circumstances in and around Buenos Aires, Argentina, with his major life challenge running to his eyesight beginning to fail him at an early age...a grim fate for such a lover of the written word. Clarice Lispector was born in a Ukrainian shtetl, and her parents moved the family to Brazil to escape the Soviet pogroms; she would eventually marry a diplomat, and be posted with him in the U.S. and elsewhere, but got no joy out of being a diplo-spouse, and moved back to Brazil with the kids. They both were highly regarded at home and abroad for their work, but life at home wasn't always so easy (dictatorships tend to do that). I know (even) less about Karen Joy Fowler's personal life, though it's interesting that despite most of her work being fantastica, the novel she's best known for is The Jane Austen Book Club, a contemporary mimetic best-seller. And Thom Jones is best remembered for his collection The Pugilist at Rest, which was his best-selling book...his period of literary celebrity being sadly short. As with Robert F. Young, a published writer whose day-job for some time was as a janitor...not the happiest of conditions; his account, from the Washington Post Magazine, might actually be a straightforward memoir...however much shaped by time and reflection.

*a variant title for this issue

Both "Doctor Brodie's Report" and "The Smallest Woman in the World" double-down on outsidership, and I wonder if Borges was sparked by Lispector, in part or altogether, to conceive of his story, though they are by no means carbon-copies...both involve Westerners making their way and mark elsewhere, in the Borges a missionary, in the Lispector an explorer, investigating among outposts African (Lispector) or Brazilian (Borges--and another reason I suspect a nod to the younger writer and her slightly earlier work...along with a nod to Swift, as the nation Brodie is investigating is dubbed the Yahoos) of isolated hunter/gatherer societies of exotic custom and alternate approaches to language, under threat from somewhat more fierce neighbors. (Another reason to consider reading the Borges at the collection link, if it's still available, or seeking out the book otherwise, aside from not having a footnote blurb interpolated into the text as it is at The Atlantic link, is for Borges and DiGiovanni's notes on the texts...and the other stories.)

Lispector's "Marmoset" (available only at the Ploughshares site online, I believe) also echoes much of the shape of her anthropology story, only involving the title monkey in a somewhat similar role, even as a pet vs. a human "discovery"...while "The Hen" deals with a similar mix of tragedy and comedy, as a hen meant by the household for a meal is "rescued" by semi-irrelevant circumstance. Lispector's "tragic sense of life" (to cop from Unamuno) is, if anything, even more omnipresent in her examples of fiction here than is Borges's similar somewhat satirical stance. By contrast, Karen Joy Fowler is more willing to indulge in a sort of small-scale version of cosmic laughter, as she unwinds her account of nearly dauntless twin sisters making their way though the enigmatic small Latin American city-state of San Margais, essentially in search of a lost chance at love, and what they find there. 

And Thom Jones's account of his summer as a corn-country public swimming pool lifeguard, and the not quite love he finds through that  task and what it all shows him, as he feels his way through his young life in a town lost in a sea of tall corn, with a polluted river running through it, and not much else to do there but eventually escape.

So, short accounts of varying degrees of alienation and yearning, all deftly told, all funny in part but sobering.

You can do worse.

For more Short Story Wednesday examples from our weekly roundelay, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

THE AMERICAN READER: 2012-2015 (10 issues) and some web content: edited by Uzoamaka Maduka; Monday Fiction Magazine #1

The American Reader was an ambitious project, perhaps even the equivalent of post-grad work for its principals, very much including the founding editor-in-chief and chief public face of the magazine, the (at founding) 25-year-old Ms. Uzoamaka "Max" Maduka, a Nigerian-American who was interested in demonstrating that there was a market among her generation of readers for relatively sophisticated literary work, but not afraid of a sales pitch leaning into would-be glamor, perhaps a fair amount of the latter driven by fund-raising necessity but perhaps also due to the desire to be On the Scene in NYC-based publishing and overlapping communities...the kind of social whirl around magazines ranging from The Paris Review to National Review (only presumably without the CIA connections and/or funding both of those had early on), and seeking the kind of stability that, say, Harper's had achieved through its institutional heir publisher. The subtitle on the cover of the first year+'s issues was "A Monthly Journal of Literature and Criticism"--it managed two monthly issues in its slightly longer than two-year run; it went to "A Bimonthly Journal...", also a schedule they couldn't maintain. But, then, essentially no one has been able to jump into the market in the last half-century or so with a monthly literary magazine...even the hardiest examples have tended to start with quarterly or bimonthly publication, and presumably with more capital on hand in most cases (and this includes the theoretically "more commercial" fiction magazines in fantastic fiction and crime fiction, where the long-running titles are mostly bimonthly these years and often were introduced, even back in the 1940s as well as in the '70s, as quarterlies). And the issues I've seen were ad-free, except for a very few house ads (touting subscriptions and their website, which featured some extra content at times).

I picked up at least a couple/few issues of the magazine during its run. I never saw the first issue, the only one in saddle-stapled format--see photo of the stack below--and with a cover stock that was easily crumpled; the balance of issues were "perfect-bound" (with glued signatures) and with a heavier stock; the new cover format was patterned (notes Amy O'Leary in New York Times coverage linked at the bottom of the post) after a French political journal, Le Contrat Social, with illustrations soon added with the flavor of another 1950s inspiration, the work of art director George Salter at the Mercury Press magazines such as The American Mercury, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and their Mercury Mystery and other newsstand periodical book lines, packaged and sold similarly to their magazines. 

The one issue I've recently turned up in my reorganization of my library is the May/June 2013 issue (still in the "monthly" subtitle era!), so I'll provide an index and links to the American Reader web archive of those contents as I find them (the site Really Could use a search function, at least).

Maduka, upon the folding of her magazine, had already joined the board of Lapham's Quarterly, and subscription fulfillment for her magazine was offered with issues of that magazine, which (as it happens) officially folded late last year.

What remains of the TAR website;  TAR's pretty good Facebook "wall"...which has been abandoned, and thus has some porn spam in comments on late posts, but still has many interesting links--and is the closest thing to an index the site has.

Karen Joy Fowler interviewed by Carmen Maria Machado

The first issue, October-November 2012

The American Reader, May-June 2013, V 1 No 5/6, edited by Uzoamaka Maduka. 172pp plus covers, $10. Irregular publication intervals, not quite bimonthly throughout its run.

3 * Anonymous/uncredited * Contributors * biographic blurbs

6 * Jacqueline Waters * Candor * poem

11 * Matthew Rohrer * The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg at the Grey Gallery, NYC * pm

12 * Matthew Rohrer * Hide in the Clouds * pm

13 * Matthew Rohrer * Two Poems for Issa * pm

14 * Matthew Rohrer * Dark Inside, Bright Outside: A Magritte * pm

15 * Matthew Rohrer * Bullshark * pm

16 * Liam Hysjulien * Stone, Deep, Mountains * pm

17 * Liam Hysjulien * The South * pm

18 * Liam Hysjulien * Teachers * pm

19 * Jameson Fitzpatrick * Adolescence * pm

20 * Jameson Fitzpatrick * Apart * pm

22 * Otto Jaffe * The South of France * ss

27 * Joyce Carol Oates * Sex with Camel * ss

40 * Ramon Isao * Feats * ss

55 * Carmen Maria Machado * Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law and Order: SVU * novelet

92 * Jonathon Kyle Sturgeon * Scenes of Emancipation: On Jacques Rancière 's Aisthesis * essay

96 * Jacques Rancière * The Cruel Radiance of What It Is: Hale County, 1936-New York, 1941 * excerpt, Aisthesis, translated by Zakir Paul, translation Verso, 2013

111 * South Korea * group/translations

112 * Jenny Wang Medina* Introduction * in

115 * Hwang Byeong-Seung * First * pm, translated by Chae-Pyong Song and  Darcy L. Brandel

116 * Moon Tae-Jun * A Brief Nap * pm, translated by Chae-Pyong Song and  Darcy L. Brandel

117 * Moon Tae-Jun * The Ibis * pm, translated by Chae-Pyong Song and  Darcy L. Brandel

118 * Moon Tae-Jun * A Pair of Shoes in the Yard * pm, translated by Chae-Pyong Song and  Darcy L. Brandel

119 *  Park Min-Gyu * Castella * ss, translated by Sora Kim-Russell

129 * Kim Aeran * Flugdatenschreiber * ss, translated by Jamie Chang

145 * Book Reviews (illustrated with uncredited spot/clip art)

146 * Jonathon Kyle Sturgeon * Francesco Pacifico's The Story of My Purity (FS&G 2013) * br

151 * Drew Calvert *Anne Carson's Red Dog (Knopf 2013) * br

156 * Eli S. Evans * A. G. Porta's The No World Concerto (Dalkey Archive Press 2013) * br

160 * Reed Cooley * New Poetry Roundup: Ray Amorosi's Lazarus (Lost Horse Press 2013), Charles Bernstein's Recalculating (University of Chicago Press 2013), Nicholas Hundley's The Revolver in the Hive (Fordham University Press 2013)

168 * Uzoamaka Maduka * Editorial Epilogue: A Woman in Love, In Love, In Love * ed

back cover: painting by Andrew Kim (a detail from which is on the front cover)

"Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law and Order: SVU" by Carmen Maria Machado

"Sex with Camel" by Joyce Carol Oates

Press Coverage, beginning and end: 

New York Times: Amy O'Leary: Uzoamaka Maduka Leaves a Paper Trail with The American Reader

The Observer: All the Happy Young Literary Women: Opening Up The American Reader by Kara Bloomgarden-Smoke 

"Literary magazine The American Reader to shutter" by Kelsey Sutton, Politico 9/23/15 3:53 PM ET

And I hope everyone has had a good Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, even given most of the weather in the U.S....