"Dinosaurs On Other Planets" by Danielle McLaughlin (from The New Yorker, September 15, 2014)

Ethel Rohan's Guest Post on Danielle McLaughlin


My Q and A with Danielle McLaughlin

I have been following the literary career of Danielle McLaughlin for almost there years now. She has very kindly participated in a wide ranging very informative Q and A session which anyone interested in the short story should read.  I have posted on three of her short stories.   One of the very rewarding aspects of blogging on contemporary writers is seeing them gain increasing recognition for their talents.  For a short story writer being published in The New Yorker Is about as good as it gets.  I was very happy to find Danielle's story "Dinosaurs On Other Planets" in the September 15th issue.   It is the title story of a collection of her short stories being published next year by The Stinging Fly.  The Stinging Fly is Ireland's leading literary journal and a world class publication of high quality short stories and poetry.   They launched the career of Kevin Barry and published the 2014 Frank O'Connor Prize Best Short Story collection winner Young Skins by Colin Barry.  

One of my purposes here is to let my readers know that this story can be read online. (I will include a link at the close of the post.)  "Dinosaurs On Other Planets" is set in rural Ireland.  In just a few pages Danielle does a masterful job of letting us see many years of family dynamics.  One of the things one sees through out Irish literature is the treatment of the surface emotional reticence of the Irish.   You can see this in Dubliners and Patrick Kavanagh's majestic poem, "The Great Hunger".  "Dinosaurs On Other Planets" is in this great tradition.   The story is set at the home of a long married couple.  The wife is fifty one, the husband much older.  He is retired and spends a lot of time wood working.   They have not slept together for a year and their living in London now adult daughter's bedroom is where the husband now sleeps.

The daughter is coming with her son and her new boyfriend for a visit.  The parents don't want her or their grandson to know they are estranged.  There is no hate, the passion, if there ever was much, is gone.  I don't want to reveal more of the plot.  I think you will enjoy finding out what the story has to do with dinosaurs on other planets, I did.

Declain  Kiberd has said the dominant theme of modern Irish literature is that of the weak or missing Irish father.  In my opinion this story exemplifies this.  Danielle talks about this in her Q and A.

You can find the story here 

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/15/dinosaurs-planets

I greatly enjoyed reading this story and I am avidly looking forward to her collection.  

Danielle McLaughlin lives in County Cork, Ireland. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The Stinging Fly, The Salt Anthology of New Writing 2013, Willesden Herald New Short Stories 7, The Long Story Short, The Irish Times, The Burning Bush 2, Inktears, Southword, 

Crannóg, Hollybough, on the RTE TEN website, on RTE Radio and in various anthologies. She has won a number of prizes for short fiction, including the Writing Spirit Award for Fiction 2010, The From the Well Short Story Competition 2012, The William Trevor/Elizabeth Bowen International Short Story Competition 2012, the Willesden Herald Short Story Competition 2012-2013 and the Merriman Short Story Competition in memory of Maeve Binchy.

"Prefiguration of Lalo Cura" by Roberto Bolano (from The New Yorker, April 10, 2010) -

The World of Marcel Proust Versus that of Roberto Bolano- my slightly twisted take

My Posts on Roberto Bolano

Roberto Bolano ( Chile, 1953 to 2003) is one of my favorite writers.  I have read several of his novels and short stories.  To those new to Bolano, just take the plunge into 2666.

Marcel Proust wrote  about courtesans, dandies, sexual explorers, and those in love with the reading life.  Bolano wrote about whores, idolers, queers, and those in love with the reading life. Balzac would tell us the only real difference between the two groups is one has lots of money.  I think Zola would be at home in both groups.  

"Preconfiguration of Lalo Cura" is narrated by a young man.  It starts out being about the narrator's great love for his mother, just like In Search of Lost Time.  The mother in Proust is a woman of style, refinement and wealth, the one in Bolano's story is a hooker and an actress in porno movies.   The young men in a Proust are looking to marry wealthy heiresses while waiting to inherit great wealth.  Those in Bolano are looking for women they  can get no name, cheap, sex from while waiting to publish their terrible poems in journals with thirty or so readers. Everyone in both works are very into the reading life.  Both groups of people gossip a lot. People in both worlds are seen as what they read.  Try to guess which group of young men die violently.

Bolano's story is another of his  voyages  into the dark streets of Latin America.  It is a throughly entertaining story, lots of interesting things happen.  I enjoyed reading it a lot.

The story is online here.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/04/19/prefiguration-of-lalo-cura

My great thanks to Max u for the gift of a New Yorker subscription allowed me to read this story.

Mel u

"Alone" by Yiyun Li (November 16, 2009, from The New Yorker) -A Short Story by the Winner of the 2005 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Prize

My Posts on Yiyun Li

If one day you are looking for quality new to you short stories one very good place to start is by looking in the archives of The New Yorker for works by winners of the annual Frank O'Connor International Short Story Prize. I was happy to find some stories by Yiyun Li in the archives.  Yiyun Li won in 2005 for her debut collection of stories A Thousand Years of Good Prayers.  I have previously read and posted on several of her short stories and one of her novels, Vagrants.  I also read but did not post on Kinder Than Solitude.  Most of her work is either set in China or deals with experiences

 of Chinese born  immigrants to America.  A deep sense of sadness and aloneness permeates her work, a sense you will never really be understood.  

My main purpose in this post is to journalise my reading of the story and to let others  know it can be read in the archives of The New Yorker for a little while.

The story centers on a woman originally from Bejing now living in the American Pacific Northwest.  Her husband of sixteen years, now back in Bejing, has filed for a divorce and she recently returned the papers. She is on a road trip alone to Vancouver, a forest fire is threatening towns.  She thinks now her husband can go to hostess bars in Bejings with his clients and not feel guilty.  She cannot escape a terrible tragedy she experienced at age twelve.  I just cannot reveal this as it would spoil the experience of first time readers.  It will make you ponder how having such an event, kept secret for decades, even from her husband, impacted her consciousness.  As the father of teenage girls, it made me think very hard to try to understand the tragedy. 

This is a suberbly told story.  I will be reading all of the Yiyun Li stories in the archives.

You can read the story here

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/11/16/alone-8

From author's webpage

Biography

Yiyun Li grew up in Beijing and came to the United States in 1996. Her debut collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, PEN/Hemingway Award, Guardian First Book Award, and California Book Award for first fiction. Her novel, The Vagrants, won the gold medal of California Book Award for fiction, and was shortlisted for Dublin IMPAC Award. Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, her second collection, was a finalist of Story Prize and shortlisted for Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. Kinder Than Solitude, her latest novel, was published to critical acclaim. Her books have been translated into more than twenty languages.

Yiyun Li has received numerous awards, including Whiting Award, Lannan Foundation Residency fellow, 2010 MacArthur Foundation fellow, and 2014 Benjamin H. Danks Award from American Academy of Arts and Letters, among others. She was selected by Granta as one of the 21 Best Young American Novelists under 35, and was named by The New Yorker as one of the top 20 writers under 40. She is a contributing editor to the Brooklyn-based literary magazine, A Public Space.

She lives in Oakland, California with her husband and their two sons, and teaches at University of California, Davis.

 

The Largesse of the Sea Maiden by Denis Johnson (March 3, 2014 in The New Yorker)

I offer my great thanks to Max u for providing me a gift subscription to The New Yorker.  This gives me the opportunity to read and share with my readers my thoughts on works by some of the greatest contemporary short story writers in the world.  Whenever I can I will provide a link to the story.  

"Once in a while, I lie there as the television runs, and I read something wild and ancient from one of several collections of folktales I own. Apples that summon sea maidens, eggs that fulfill any wish, and pears that make people grow long noses that fall off again. Then sometimes I get up and don my robe and go out into our quiet neighborhood looking for a magic thread, a magic sword, a magic horse."

Denis Johnson has been mentioned by a number of the short story writers with whom I have done Q and A sessions as a short story writer whose work they greatly admire. I have learned to trust their advise.   I was happy to find a new story by Johnson in a recent issue of The New Yorker. 

"The Largesse of the Sea Maiden" started out a bit slow for me, seeming like kind of a combination of a Cheever and a Carver story about a hard drinking advertising copywriter, formerly of New York City now living in San Diego.  I was not really that taken with the story for the first few pages then as the story began to wander down the dark back streets of New York City, the narrator was there to pick up an award for one of his TV commercials at a ceremony, I came to understand why people like Johnson so much.  Much of the story is taken up with glimpses into the lives of people he meets.  

I will leave the main plot of the story untold so as not to spoil the experience of first time readers.  I for sure hope to read Jesus's Son one day.

You can read this story here:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/03/03/the-largesse-of-the-sea-maiden

Born in Munich on July 1, 1949, Denis Johnson was raised in Tokyo, Manila, and the suburbs outside of Washington, D.C. He studied with Raymond Carver while earning his MFA from the University of Iowa. While still enrolled, his first collection of poetry, The Man Among the Seals (Stone Wall Press, 1969), was published.

During the next few years, Johnson published several collections of poetry, including Inner Weather (Graywolf, 1976); The Incognito Lounge (Random House, 1982), selected by Mark Strand for The National Poetry Series in 1982; andThe Veil (Knopf, 1985); as well as four novels, including Angels (Knopf, 1983), which received the Sue Kauffman Prize for First Fiction from the Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

During this time he struggled with alcoholism and various other addictions. It was out of these experiences that he wrote his breakthrough volume of stories, Jesus’ Son (Harper Perennial, 1992), which was later adapted for the screen.

Please share your experience with Johnson with us.

Mel u