Vheissu

The New Yorker and Zoetrope are up there among the most prestigious venues for short stories, and actor and writer Sam Shepard published something on both, a few weeks apart. So why not comment on both stories at once? I read “Land of the Living” first. The New Yorker has it on its website, here . It’s a simple enough story about a family (mother, father, two kids) from Minnesota that goes on vacation to Cancún. The tale looks pretty uneventful, stirred by funny dialogues and the typical stuff that goes awry on vacation, until, out of the blue, the wife asks her husband if he has a girlfriend. He denies it promptly, but he spends more time and energy remarking on how inappropriate it is to talk about this in front of the kids, and asking where she’s getting her ideas from. Your cell phone, she says when asked; a woman called. It could’ve been anyone, he protests. This is a first-person story, narrated by the husband, so we could’ve gotten a flat denial any time; we don’t. The s...

Last week I got a copy of the Summer 2009 edition of Zoetrope: All-Story . Sure, I had read stories from Zoetrope before ( here ’s one I commented on a couple of weeks ago), but I had never held the print edition in my hands. It has a striking cover, and the pages are filled with photography. This abundance of images makes the slender volume quite tiny: there are six short stories in all, one of them two pages long. (About the artwork, well, it’s contemporary; some of the blobs of paint dripping on pages 27-28 were interesting. The guest designer was Antony, from Antony and the Johnsons . ) After I read the first story, I thought I’d be disappointed by this edition. Boy was I wrong. The following four stories were all superb. The first story was “At the Airport,” by Ryu Murakami. A woman is waiting at the airport for a customer who’s grown into her lover and with whom she is now planning to elope. She is divorced, one of the details about her life that we learn as she fills ...