Month: June 2026

  • Short Story Review: “Stories” by Annie Ernaux

    (The short story “Stories” by Annie Ernaux, which was translated from the French by Alison L. Strayer, appeared in the June 8th, 2026 issue of The New Yorker.)

    Photograph by Jet Swan for The New Yorker

    You know what I like most about Annie Ernaux’s “Stories”? Well, besides the language, and tone, and ethereal feeling of the loss of a past childhood, or how it feels innocent and menacing at the same time, or the power of words and storytelling, or how the protagonist/narrator doesn’t seem to be a very nice person because she sort of traumatizes a five-year-old. No, my appreciation for this story began to form when I finished reading it, as I was left wondering how fictional was this piece? I know full well that the overwhelming majority of Ernaux’s work is autobiographical, but I was still left wondering, to what degree is this fictional, or factual? For the sake of writing this, I’m going to come down on the side of fiction, as it is in the “Fiction” issue of The New Yorker, but I feel that for this story to work on all levels, Ernaux needs us the believe that this really happened. And not a portion of it; all of it. Even though I am sure this story is based on an event which has been fictionalized.

    See, it’s that last paragraph which might well be the best, and correctly used version of the “Dead chick in the basket” trick. (To explain, “Dead Chick in the Basket” refers to a writing device where the final paragraph of a short story contains new information about a character which is meant to make the reader view the actions, statements, or feelings of that character in a different light. This device was effectively used in J.D. Salinger’s short story “Just Before the War with the Eskimos,” where the name of the device comes from.) We go through this whole story, and then are given this last paragraph which seems to explain that this is all real. Or is it? She is a character in her own story? She wrote this to understand herself, but ended up writing another story? (You know, this just might be an unreliable narrator.)

    I will die on this hill of a fictional interpretation, because wasn’t Ernaux trying to tell us in this story that she discovered she had the ability to create a fiction so powerful that the audience accepted it as reality and had an honest emotional reaction to it? It’s like it’s meta on meta on meta. And we will never figure out what the truth is because only Ernaux knows that.

  • Earworm Wednesday: Not the Happiest Song

    Somewhere around 1998 or 1999, I friend of mine gifted me a very, very bootleg copy of a bunch of Radiohead singles that weren’t on any of their albums. I love Radiohead, and I like how their music just doesn’t fit in any one box, and same goes for their fans, to be honest.

    All of the singles on the bootleg were awesome, but one stood out to me as being the most melancholic of a downer song imaginable, and I loved it! What hooks me is the very beginning of the song – it’s just hypnotic.

    Oh, and I can only listen to this song a hand full of times in a week, or it starts to make me depressed. So, you have been warned and handle with care.

  • Ode to My Dog Who Sleeps All Day

    Oh, my little dog.

    You do nothing all day.

    To move from your bed, to my bed, to under my bed, to the couch, then under the dinning room table, ending on the middle of the floor; you are so tired.

    When I am at my desk, you lay under it. I look down at you, and though you act like you are sleeping, I see your side eye.

    What do you wonder? What do you dream?

    You do not understand time, but you understand pattern.

    Where is the lady? Where is the kid? Why are you still here? I think I will sleep. No! I will lick my left front paw. THEN, I will sleep. Hey you’re moving… I will follow you to the couch… where I will sleep next to you.

  • Fatherhood: Baby Teeth Edition

    The kid needs to lose one more tooth and then she can get braces. At least that was what I was told by the orthodontist. As such, we have been going to town trying all the tricks to get that last baby tooth out. Within reason, that is. She’s been eating crunchy vegetables and wiggling the tooth with her tongue. My father suggested the old tie a string around the door handle and the tooth trick, but that one seemed to scare the kid a little. Odds are that the tooth will come out in the next couple of days. I feel the act/desire to have to the tooth out is what is causing the tooth to stay in – as that is how the Universe works for most things.

    In a larger sense, I never imagined how much time I would spend in my fatherhood worrying, dealing with, and caring for the loss of baby teeth. I imagined quite a few scenarios of being a father, but grappling with baby teeth wasn’t one of them.

    I feel like there is a book there, waiting to be written, “Everything I Had No Idea About When It Came to Being a Dad.” I think I have written several blogs about this, though right now, I can’t think of any of those issues.

    That’s the other thing about fatherhood; what was odd and new today, is normal and old by tomorrow.