Minus the Spine

Oodles of great stuff in the New Yorker’s Summer Fiction Issue, including a heretofore (what a great word) unpublished story by Vladmir Nabokov, called Natasha. I’m visiting my brother and family this weekend and I know on the train ride home tomorrow I’ll be listening to this podcast on the site of Mary Gaitskill reading the first story Nabokov published in the New Yorker and then discussing it. In the print version, Gaitskill has a story of her own and although I haven’t read a volume of hers before, I think I’ll be adding her to my TBR list. Also in the print version is a story by Annie Proulx called Tits-up in a Ditch (abstract only) that involves a girl raised by her rancher grandparents and wounded in the Iraq War, so the timeliness is an interesting meld with Proulx’s kind of timeless writing–you sometimes don’t know what era she is writing about because, well, all of her characters are so ass-backwards. Anyway, it stuck with me the past couple of days. Sometimes her writing really hits me and other times it couldn’t be more boring for her, but today when I found myself driving on country backroads out in the farmland of central Maryland, her story about this lost girl named Dakotah, seemed so much closer.