To Enhance This Week's Reading

This week we are reading stories from The New Yorker by Maile Meloy and Louise Erdrich. I'd like us to not only study the stories I assign you by themselves, but also in the context of the careers of the writers who wrote these stories, and where they were published.

The New Yorker

We'll talk more about The New Yorker in class for the next few days, but notice that five out of the twenty stories in the Best American come from The New Yorker. This says something about the quality of the work they publish--and also, I suspect, the taste of the editors of BASS. Check out the actually-pretty-good Wikipedia page on the New Yorker for more about its history. 

As we read the next three stories in class, let's try to figure out what similarities these stories have. What makes a "New Yorker" story?

Maile Meloy

Maile Meloy is the author of the novels Liars and Saints and A Family Daughter and the story collections Half in Love and Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It, which was named one of the Ten Best Books of 2009 by the New York Times Book Review and one of the best books of the year by the Los Angeles Times and Amazon.com. She has also written a trilogy for young readers, beginning with The Apothecary, which was a New York Times bestseller and won the 2012 E.B. White Award. Meloy’s short stories have been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, and other publications, and she has received The Paris Review’s Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two California Book Awards, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.  In 2007, she was chosen as one of Granta’s 21 Best Young American Novelists.  Her essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, Slate, Sunset, and O. She grew up in Helena, Montana, and now lives in Los Angeles.

Click here to read this very interesting interview with Meloy in The Fiction Writers Review. 

Louise Erdrich

Louise Erdrich is the author of fifteen novels as well as volumes of poetry, children’s books, short stories, and a memoir of early motherhood. Her novel The Round House won the National Book Award for Fiction. The Plague of Doves won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and her debut novel, Love Medicine, was the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Erdrich has received the Library of Congress Prize in American Fiction, the prestigious PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. She lives in Minnesota with her daughters and is the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore.

Click here to read a long, but wonderful interview with Louise Erdrich in The Paris Review.

Victor Lodato

Victor Lodato is a playwright, poet, and novelist.  His book, Mathilda Savitch, was hailed by The New York Times as “a Salingeresque wonder of a first novel” and was deemed a “Best Book of the Year” by The Christian Science Monitor,Booklist, and The Globe and Mail.  The novel won the PEN USA Award for Fiction and the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, and has been published in sixteen countries. Victor is a Guggenheim Fellow, as well as the recipient of fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, The Princess Grace Foundation, The Camargo Foundation (France), and The Bogliasco Foundation (Italy). His short fiction and essays have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Best American Short Stories. His new novel, Edgar and Lucy, is forthcoming from St. Martin’s Press.

As a playwright, he is the recipient of the Weissberger Award for Motherhouseand the PEN USA Award for Arlington (a collaboration with composer Polly Pen). Other plays include Wildlife, Dear Sara Jane, The Bread of Winter, and Slay the Dragon.  Other honors include the Helen Merrill Award, John Golden Prize, Roger L. Stevens Award from The Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays, and the Julie Harris Playwriting Award. His work has been produced and developed nationally and internationally at venues such as Vineyard Theatre, Actors Theatre of Louisville (Humana Festival), Manhattan Theatre Club, The Guthrie Theatre, Williamstown Theatre Festival, American Conservatory Theatre, Primary Stages, The National Theatre (London), Quartieri dell’Arte Festival (Rome), and Theatre Na Zabradli (Prague).

Victor lives in Ashland, Oregon and Tucson, Arizona.

Click here to read an interview that Victor gave in the New Yorker about "Jack, July."