Great new(ish) stories from around the Web. Forget work for a minute and read a story. It’s good for you.
– He was in Soho, leaning against the counter at the French House, waiting for his benefactor to show for a celebratory glass of red (‘it’s a darling place,’ Leonard had enthused, ‘but as crowded as a dictionary’). Fiddling with a beer mat, Ben’s mood darkened. Were his relationships doomed like his parents’? Was that the reason he had cheated on Daniel? After all, his dad had done the same twenty years earlier (with a colleague too). Maybe neither of them was capable of love. — Stephen Emms in Happiness Is An Option
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Tagged as:
New Literature Online
Walking A Slippery Slope
While much of the country endured a weekend of heavy snow, Vashon enjoyed balmy days and relatively clear skies. We took advantage of the pleasant weather and headed to the north end of the island, where recently a new hiking trail was cleared. The trail is two miles long and descends into the belly of a deep gorge, which is populated by hulking, moss-strewn trees and thousands of silvery ferns blinking in the sunshine. The warm weather resulted in inch-deep layers of wet mud, occasionally turning the serene hike into a treacherous downhill slide. All this got us thinking about the power of place — how its dualities influence the stories we read and the stories we write. The crime writer Philip Carlo understands. He’s made his career visiting prison cells and profiling the mafia’s nastiest assassins. But now the tables have turned and he’s trapped in a very different type of prison, his own body. A writer in The Atlantic wonders how the ghosts of Christmas present compromise her domestic bliss and the editor of Granta considers this year’s best debut fiction. Elsewhere, a Hungarian novelist describes the challenge of creating art while living in a virtual police state, a novel written by Mary McCarthy in 1963 is praised as being ahead of its time, and The Economist explains how human identity is a simple and profoundly complex arrangement. Finally, it wouldn’t be Monday without a throwback to a bygone era, which, in this case, means admiring artistic propaganda from the 1960′s. That’s some dual nature, man. — Kevin Murphy
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Tagged as:
Literature in the Media,
Monday's Body of Work
