My Virtual Monocle Has Popped Out

May 11th, 2009Blog0 comments

Hey so how about that The New Yorker Magazine? With them funny animal cartoons and all that erudite whimsy and shit? It is perhaps the only publication in New York that doesn’t have escort ads in the back — the only one I’d read, anyway.

So they’ve got this fiction podcast. (Link goes to iTunes store) It’s not as accessible as The Moth podcast (see earlier post) but it’s just as interesting.

Contemporary writers read classic pieces of fiction from the magazine’s archives, then discuss their importance. I know this already sounds like a homework assignment, but it’s actually pretty great. In “Luck of the Draw”, A.M. Homes reads Shirley Jackson’s classic “The Lottery”.

I remember when we read “The Lottery” in high school. Our English teacher had us collect stones outside, then huck them at her TA. True story! The TA was pissed. She had senioritis and here she was being pelted by sophomores with rocks. And they weren’t the smooth kind described in the story. They were the prickly rocky kind. They hurt.

She’s lucky we didn’t throw them very hard — technically we could have stoned her to death and gotten off scott free because we were just following orders.

So — the New Yorker Fiction podcast. Pretty great! Not as accessible as The Moth podcast with its stories of twins making out and people being stabbed nearly to death, but pretty cool in a fancy, upper-crusty kind of way. CATCH IT