(The short story “The Dreamdrive” by Weike Wang appeared in the May 25th, 2026 issue of The New Yorker.)
Illustration by Chris Harnan
Reading “The Dreamdrive” was like watching my favorite basketball player miss an unobstructed layup.
First, there was the tone of the piece, which was attempting to be lighter, easy, and humorous. The effect of this was that the story never achieved a depth. Everything was presented at arm’s length, making the story feel like nothing was at risk, or truly important. Also, in an attempt at humor, one character was described as “his then girlfriend,” implying her eventual fate. This cliched trick of description can work if it is partnered with irony, but in this setting, the attempt was to humorously build sympathy for our sad sack of a protagonist. Unfortunately, I did not see the reason why we needed to have this information presented in such a manner.
Second, the revelation of the dream fell out of the sky and crashed like dishes on the floor. It was as if the narrator decided that the story needed to end now, and we were quickly given the relevance of what had been happening. But without any foreshadowing, or even a climatic build up, the revelation doesn’t achieve any resonance. Such as, now that the protagonist understands where his reoccurring dream is coming from, how does that help him move forward? It’s implied that he can sleep again, but is there nothing deeper here? How is the hero changed, other than being able to sleep? It felt to me that an emotional plot point was missing.
Third, with the tone and lack of resonance in this story, it made the narrator sound condescending to the protagonist. The narrator treats the protagonist as a person to ridicule and kick around. Multiple times the hero is shown as a person no one takes seriously. And honestly, if the narrator doesn’t care about the protagonist, then why should the reader?
(The short story “Standings” by Chang-rae Lee appeared in the May 11th & 18th, 2026 issue of The New Yorker.)
Illustration by Adrian Tomine
When I graduated high school, my uncle got me a subscription to The New Yorker. He was a very smart and well-read man, and he knew of my ambitions to have a writing career, and this graduation gift, which I emphatically received with much excitement, was his way of encouraging me. I say all of this because off and on over my adult life, I have continued to subscribe to The New Yorker, and for that reason I feel fully justified, due to my extensive financial investment in the publication, to complain to the Fiction Department, and formally request they stop publishing works of short fiction which are merely excerpts from novels. I speak of Chang-rae Lee’s “Standings”, which by the magazine’s own admission “… is drawn from “A Tender Age.”” Then adds Change-rae Lee “…is the author of the novel “A Tender Age.” (August, 2026)” Though this work is an excerpt, it was published in the short fiction section of the magazine, so I will be reviewing it as a short story.
“Standings” is the type of story that suffers from the sins of being too smart for its own good, and wanting to do too much. The story is overly long, bringing in as many details as possible to give the reader the full feeling and experience of what it was like to grow up in this environment of 1976 adolescence. Not to make light of the subject matter, but this is a coming of age story of boys on the cusp of crossing into adulthood, and being unclear what to do with the rage and aggressiveness they are supposed to embrace as they try to figure out what manhood is. This is a pack of “lost boys” with no direct positive male influence, and left to their own devices, devolve into racism and violence. On the surface, this is a deep well to work with, and speaks to the potential of an engaging and enlightening story. But here, the story felt unfocused on what it truly wanted to tell, with many tangents of ideas flailing. As Milhouse would say, “When are they going to get to the fireworks factory?!”
Another issue that I had here was that I never felt the protagonist was ever in any peril through the course of the story. I spoke of the aggression between the boys, but the tone flipped between a comical story of boys posturing toward each other knowing that nothing would happen, to a very serious they must kill or be killed. Instead of creating a logically narrative development, such as playing at being violent leading to violence as survival, the story seemed to flip a switch. What we are given is a bipolar feeling of it just “happens,” which left me thinking I had missed a step, or an unearned short cut was taken. By doing that, the intention of the action never felt believable. The protagonist does pull out a knife at school and tries to harm another student, yet his consequences are suspension, some therapy, a bit of social ostracization, but on the whole he was able to continue on as a well-adjusted adult. Meanwhile the other boy has trouble coming out of his home due to the trauma, and another boy turns out was schizophrenic all along. Other than that…
This brings me to my last point, which is that I never felt an urgency in the writing. In my point above, I stated that the protagonist never felt in peril, and part of that has to do with the language used. The narrator/protagonist is clearly writing this story – this is a first-person narrative that would never be confused with a friend talking to us, or a person at a bar telling us this story. No, this is unquestionably a story being written, and as such, it sticks to the rules. (Hell, the knife was introduced in the second act, and was used in the third.) It felt like an undergrad working hard to get an A in a creative writing class. The narrative plays it safe and does everything right, but in so doing, it never takes a risk or displays an intensity. The thought that I had reading this was maybe you can be simplistic and minimal.
“Standings” doesn’t work as a short story, but I also admit I don’t think it was ever meant to. For all I know, “A Tender Age” could be a great book, and given the breath and space that a novel can take, perhaps all of these pieces tie together and it plays like a fine-tuned song. But in the end, this just hammers home to me that not every story should be a short story.
(The flash fiction story “Rewind” by Cole Beauchamp appeared at Lost Balloonon January 7th, 2026.)
The flash fiction that I love straddles a precarious knife’s edge. On one side is the prose, the other being the poetic, and if they counter balance correctly, a beautiful harmony is created. Reading Cole Beauchamp’s “Rewind” put me right on that the edge’s sweet spot; a tactile narrative countered with an eternal instant.
The structure of “Rewind” is divided into three section, each beginning with the same first line, “I have something to tell you…” In the first section, a couple is descending down a mountain during a hike while the husband attempts to explain what is implied to be his infidelity, which the wife has no interest in hearing. The section ends with the wife accidently falling off the path, tumbling down, and all goes black, followed by one word: Rewind. The second section takes places in the past, this time the wife is making a special dinner attempting to make up to her husband for all the time that she’s been away. Just as in the first section, the second section concludes with the wife losing her footing and falling, again with all going black; Rewind. The final section takes places the night before their wedding, and them sneaking out to see each other, with the wife stating that they “can’t rewind any further.”
The three moments selected in “Rewind” are snap shots of this marriage. The first being the only one that I believe takes place in a tactile moment. This marriage is over, even if the husband isn’t aware of it, for the wife knows that she has stopped loving him. When she falls and all goes black, that ushers in the next two section which I will argue take place in her memory, existing in her own eternal instant. The second section is close to a mirror image of the first section; same opening line, the disappoints, to apologies, and the falling. The first was his fault, and now we are being shown how she was an accomplice in the death of this relationship. But the second section acts as a bridge; though it is in the eternal, the language Beauchamp uses is still rooted in factual descriptions. When the third section arrives, the language softens, the poetic is embraced, and thematically, a melancholic tone is embraced which intertwines with the recollection of the past optimism this marriage had.
No one goes into a marriage thinking that it will fail, and when things go wrong, that initial optimism can feel like it’s a million miles away in a different life. Cole Beauchamp’s “Rewind” played with this theme in a structure that I appreciated for its inventiveness, but most importantly, this was the type of flash fiction that embraced the unique qualities this form can have, which are prose and poetry wrapped tightly together.
There was a moment when I was reading Saïd Sayrafiezadeh’s “Process of Elimination” that I had to ask myself if it was possible to have a reliable narrator in a story who is completely unreliable because of the situation they find themselves in? On one hand, that doesn’t feel so much like a question, but more like an unsolvable literary riddle. But on the other hand, having this conundrum of a narrator kept me on my toes reading this story, happily figuring out which situations were and were not misinterpretations.
The story follows a guy who unfortunately has the same first name of one of the Boston Marathon bombers, and that terrorist attack plays in the background of the piece. This guy is a recent hire at coffee shop which is located on a university campus in a New England, two states away from Boston. As the story begins, our narrator is informed that he is about the be fired from this job. At first he assumes this termination is due to a missing tip jar, but it is also implied that his name might be part of the reason.
What I enjoyed about the protagonist is how normally flawed he is as a person. Maybe a little too eager to please, a little lazy, and perhaps prone to “get out over his skis” when it comes to events, but not a bad guy. He does his best in the situation he finds himself in, a minor crisis of employment and unemployment, trying to figure out what events, statements, actions are connected, and what actions he should take next. And when he receives a resolution that he desired months later; he is faced with the fact that he truly didn’t understand all the factors coming into play with his termination. There is a nice O. Henry touch of irony there with his guilt, and a wonderful last line to the story, that gave me a laugh as the narrator had failed up.
“Process of Elimination” is another solid story from Saïd Sayrafiezadeh in The New Yorker, and I do commend his skill of working in several different tangents to this piece, to build a layered theme, tone, and setting. This wasn’t a “big” dramatic story, and there is a nice mix of humor in this piece as well, but it touches on the dramas and crises that make up our day to day lives which unfold while larger events develop around us; perhaps even unintentionally influencing our actions? Seems like a rather timely story, if you ask me.
Douglas Stuart’s “A Private View” reminds me of the short stories that The New Yorker used to publish back in the 50’s and 60’s. (This is meant as a compliment, FYI…) Those stories of old were all set in fabulously wonderful Manhattan, the characters had fascinating jobs in the arts, the stories took place in some social event or interaction, and everybody had lots of baggage. There was a strange comfortability in those old short stories, yet I would never call them predictable, as they seemed to project a New Yorker contemporary literary ideal. In this light, reading “A Private View” was the equivalent of reading on a rainy day in a warm sweater drinking a cup of coffee.
This was a story that did lull me in. Perhaps I should admit that I am a sucker for stories about mothers and sons. The more troubled the better, and for that reason, I wasn’t paying strict attention to the story, and just let it easily roll and unfold before me. Also, with characters that were from Texas, it was almost too much up my alley.
With all of that, I still have to say that I appreciated that this was a story that wasn’t afraid to take it’s time, flesh out the characters, and sprinkle the little clues on the edges of the frame. I also enjoyed Stuart’s use of the art show and the sculptures of the stations of the cross, and his descriptions of the contemporary figures that were worked in. It played wonderful with the theme of the story, and also provided a very fertile Gen-X visual vocabulary of childhood characters that still seem to flourish in the imaginations of people of a certain age.
But what struck me as the most honest and true aspect of the story was the relationship between mother and son, and the satellite of the sister as well. It was palatable how uncomfortable all these relationships were with each other, and also understandable why each of the siblings made the choices that they did. One couldn’t stand to be disappointed anymore, and the other couldn’t let go. Perhaps the son was closer in personality to his mother, or perhaps the sister made her decision to let go, and the son had to hold on.
I am keeping this review vague as I don’t want to give away anything in this story, but clearly I feel you should read it. Especially read it as Stuart does an excellent job with the climax, and the dénouement. Though heartbreaking, I found protagonist decision at the end of the story melancholy in its acknowledgement of the truth. A truth was needed, for this hero had been on this journey for some time, and it was time for him to move on.
