Lydia Peelle, Caught Up in “The Long Rain”

When I got the news about this year’s “5 Under 35” selections from the National Book Foundation, I was delighted to see Lydia Peelle on the list. I’ve been enjoying her debut short story collection, Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing not just for her ability to depict characters who are learning to recognize the pivotal life moments they’re passing through (or, in some cases, passed through years ago), but also for stories like “Phantom Pain” which show the effects of a rumor rippling through a community, brushing up against the other emotional burrs with which people are coping. It looks like New York literati will get a chance to hear Peelle for herself when she comes to the 5 Under 35 celebration in November; until then, this rising writer has graciously shared some thoughts about a short story that moved her in her not-so-distant youth.

I was lucky enough to encounter brilliant English teachers during that tumultuous time of life that is junior high school—and it was with the most brilliant of them all, near-sighted and perspicacious Mr. Hopkins, with his Coke-bottle glasses and rarefied philosophical ramblings (well over our heads, but I’d like to think some of it percolated through), that I first read Ray Bradbury. How grateful I am that I was introduced to this master’s work so early, at such an impressionable time, and by such a wonderful teacher. The book was The Illustrated Man, it was the last semester of 8th grade, and despite the burgeoning distractions of spring, my friends and I feel deeply in love with all things Bradbury.

Though we had read plenty of short stories through the school years, I think The Illustrated Man must have been the first story collection I ever read. For me it opened up an enormous realm of potential. I became aware of the alchemy that exists in great short story collections: how they are greater than the sum of their parts, and how, within their pages, an entire world can be assembled (or, in Bradbury’s case, an entire universe—literally).

The book’s framing premise—that each story is depicted in a tattoo (drawn years ago by a time-traveling witch) on a wandering man’s body and that anyone who looks long enough will eventually see his own death—was just the stuff to capture our attention and imagination. We were just as taken with this framing as we were with the individual stories (all of them still so clearly in my mind to this day, with their chilling and often accurate views of the future as foretold by Bradbury in the middle of the 20th century: “The Veldt,” “The Rocket Man, “Marionettes, Inc.”) and we used to pass notes—in math class or science class, of course, never during English—decorated with our own “illustrated men,” crude blank bodies hastily drawn and filled in with pictures that depicted the drama of our days: this boy, or that teacher, or one of the lunch-hour adventures we were always scheming.

Suffice to say, these stories lodged deeply in my mind and memory, in the way only things one reads when very young do. There is one story in particular that has stayed with me, in high resolution: “The Long Rain,” a deceptively simple story with so much in it from which to learn.

(more…)

13 October 2009 | selling shorts |

Read This: Mrs. Beatrice’s Favorite iPhone App

I was recently given the opportunity to test-drive the new McSweeney’s iPhone app, but since I’m still using a Treo for a while longer, I passed the invitation on to Mrs. Beatrice, who filed this report after experimenting with the app for a few days:

To begin, a confession: I have about six trillion iPhone apps. It’s actually slightly embarrassing, since I can’t find half of them at any given time (yeah, I know about the search function—that just seems like cheating, somehow), and a good portion of the other half are those games you’re obsessed with for about a day and then wonder why in the hell you spent the $0.99.

But I actually put the McSweeney’s app in a nice little corner that I can find easily, because it’s quickly become one of my favorites. You’ll find the same stuff you’ve learned to love in the print and Web versions of McSweeney’s—for example, “Ethical Dilemmas Involving Klondike Bars,” by Justin Hook, or “YouTube Comment or e.e. cummings?,” by Francois Vincent (an embarrassing note about the latter piece—I got every single one wrong). But now you’ll be able to read it on the subway or other weird places you can’t get the Internet. And it updates every day, or nearly, so there’s something new to read each day you go back to the app.

McSweeney’s fans should definitely buy this app. And all the people who aren’t McSweeney’s fans must not have read McSweeney’s yet, so of course, they should buy the app, too.

4 October 2009 | read this |