For Immediate Release: June 1, 2015
Press Contacts: Natalie Raabe, (212) 286-6591
Molly Erman, (212) 286-7936
Adrea Piazza, (212) 286-4255
Inside the Annual Summer Fiction Issue
The New Yorker’s annual Summer Fiction Issue, on newsstands and online today, once again brings together some of the world’s premier
literary voices. This year, writers explore the theme of “Secret Histories,” with historical fiction that uncovers hidden moments in the past.
In “The Republic of Bad Taste” (p. 63), an exclusive excerpt from his forthcoming novel, “Purity,” Jonathan Franzen follows the estranged,
cynical, dissident son of an East German government official in the nineteen-eighties, as he—a counsellor for troubled youth—becomes
so enamored of one of his charges that he’s willing to kill for her. “Annagret’s beauty was so striking, so far outside the norm, that it seemed
like a pointed affront to the Republic of Bad Taste,” Franzen writes. “It shouldn’t have existed; it upset the orderly universe at whose center he’d always placed himself; it frightened him. He was twenty-seven years old, and (unless you counted his mother when he was little)
he’d never been in love, because he had yet to meet—had stopped even trying to imagine—a girl who was worth it. But here one was.”
In “Escape from New York” (p. 38), Zadie Smith imagines what happens when Michael Jackson, Elizabeth Taylor, and Marlon Brando
flee New York City in a rented Toyota Camry in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 (a journey that, according to some published accounts,
is rumored to have occurred). Michael “could not get over how well he was handling the apocalypse so far,” Smith writes. “Sure, he was
terrified, but, at the same time, oddly elated and—vitally—not especially medicated, for his assistant had all his stuff, and he hadn’t told
her he was escaping from New York until they were already on the road, fearing his assistant would try to stop him, as she usually tried to
stop him doing the things he most wanted to do. Now he was beyond everyone’s reach. He struggled to think of another moment in his
life when he’d felt so free. Was that terrible to say?”
In “The Prospectors” (p. 90), Karen Russell tells the story of two young women grifters in Depression-era Oregon, who “prospect among
the prospectors,” stealing from the wealthy men who court them. One night, after taking the wrong route to a mountaintop party, they
find themselves in the company of twenty-six gracious—and, unfortunately, long-dead—suitors.
In “Quaestio de Centauris” (p. 56), a story that appears here in English for the first time, Primo Levi recounts the lessons that a young
man learns from the centaur who lives with his family—the hardest of which comes when they both fall for the same woman.
In “Love Is Blind and Deaf ” (p. 45), Jonathan Safran Foer reimagines Adam and Eve as two imperfect people, who, having lost their innocence, struggle to bridge the divide between them: “First they fought passively, then they despaired privately, then they used the new words ambiguously, then pointedly, then they conceived Cain, then they hurled the early creations, then they argued about who owned the pieces
of what had never belonged to anybody.”
In a series of short essays on the subject on time travel, Louise Erdrich fantasizes about leaping through time to change the fates of some of her favorite fictional heroines (p. 46); Daniyal
Mueenuddin remembers his father, a member of the civil service in undivided India, who had
a penchant for hunting crocodiles (p. 55); Rebecca Curtis considers her relationship with a man
who, although he is different from her in almost every way, loves H. G. Wells’s “The Time Machine” as much as she does (p. 61); Thomas McGuane recalls his boyhood visits to Fall River,
Massachusetts, in the nineteen-fifties, “when every town had, as Eudora Welty once said, an individual face, like that of a person” (p. 69); Sam Lipsyte considers what might be the best era to
travel back to, and finds that yesterday is the perfect destination (p. 83).
Plus: In Comment, Amy Davidson examines the mysterious circumstances under which Jason
Rezaian, the Washington Post’s Tehran correspondent, was arrested and imprisoned in Iran—a
CHRISTOPH NIEMANN
Also in this issue, Robyn Creswell and Bernard Haykel consider how poetry has become a
mode of manifesto for ISIS militants (p. 102).
country that is increasingly treating reporting as a criminal act (p. 31); in the Financial Page, James Surowiecki considers the danger of
a bubble in China’s speculative stock market (p. 36); Anthony Lane reads “The Story of Alice,” the latest addition to the abundant scholarship about Lewis Carroll, and considers how parts of the writer’s life remain as confounding as ever (p. 48); in a photo portfolio, Hilton Als reflects on the work of the Italian artist Nicola Lo Calzo, with accompanying images from Lo Calzo’s most recent project, “Obia,”
which focusses on the Maroons of Suriname and French Guiana—a marginalized community of former African slaves (p. 84); Emily
Nussbaum reviews “Cucumber” and “Banana,” two new British series by Russell T. Davies (p. 110); and Anthony Lane watches “Love
& Mercy,” about the life of Brian Wilson, and “San Andreas,” starring Dwayne Johnson (p. 112).
Online: This week’s Out Loud podcast has been resurfaced from the archive in honor of the Summer Fiction Issue. In it, Sasha Weiss
speaks with Ann Goldstein and D. T. Max about the novelist Elena Ferrante; on the Political Scene podcast, Jelani Cobb and John Cassidy discuss the post-Baltimore state of race in America with Dorothy Wickenden; on the monthly Fiction podcast, Michael Cunningham talks with Deborah Treisman about Harold Broadkey’s short story “Dumbness Is Everything.”
Tablet and Phone Extras: In a video, Robyn Creswell and Bernard Haykel look at poems written and performed by ISIS militants;
Karen Russell and Zadie Smith read their short stories; Adam Fitzgerald reads his poem; and Richard Brody picks his Movie of the
Week, Charlie Chaplin’s “Limelight,” from 1952.
CHRISTOPHER WEYANT
The June 8 & 15, 2015, issue of The New Yorker goes on sale at newsstands beginning Monday, June 1.