When the band broke apart, I cleaned up and moved back in with my mother. I got a job as a substitute teacher. One period I might be covering a history class, the next running a chemistry lab. I was grateful to the student who said, "Mr. Lipsyte, I really think you should wear protective goggles during this experiment." I was not as grateful to the one who said, "My dad told me all subs are losers."
Not all subs, I thought, but quite possibly me. I was eager, in fact, for a quiet, unambitious existence, a long, boring, soul-mending sojourn. I didn't foresee that two events would infuse this period with an intensity I haven't quite known since.
First came a phone call from Gordon Lish, the famous fiction editor. I'd received encouraging rejections from his magazine in college, but I'd lost my drive and nerve for writing fiction. Now I began to rediscover it, and after I sent in a new story he offered me a spot in a private seminar that some considered a cult. I had already attended twelve-step meetings and they'd helped me, so I figured there were good cults and bad cults. My mother, a journalist and a novelist, had reservations about the class, but also seemed happy that somebody had taken an interest in her no-longer-so-promising son.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der July 10 - 17, 2023 (Double Issue)-Ausgabe von The New Yorker.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der July 10 - 17, 2023 (Double Issue)-Ausgabe von The New Yorker.
Starten Sie Ihre 7-tägige kostenlose Testversion von Magzter GOLD, um auf Tausende kuratierte Premium-Storys sowie über 8.000 Zeitschriften und Zeitungen zuzugreifen.
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President for Sale - A survey of today's political ads.
On a mid-October Sunday not long ago sun high, wind cool-I was in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for a book festival, and I took a stroll. There were few people on the streets-like the population of a lot of capital cities, Harrisburg's swells on weekdays with lawyers and lobbyists and legislative staffers, and dwindles on the weekends. But, on the façades of small businesses and in the doorways of private homes, I could see evidence of political activity. Across from the sparkling Susquehanna River, there was a row of Democratic lawn signs: Malcolm Kenyatta for auditor general, Bob Casey for U.S. Senate, and, most important, in white letters atop a periwinkle not unlike that of the sky, Kamala Harris for President.
LIFE ADVICE WITH ANIMAL ANALOGIES
Go with the flow like a dead fish.
CONNOISSEUR OF CHAOS
The masterly musical as mblages of Charles Ives
BEAUTIFUL DREAMERS
How the Brothers Grimm sought to awaken a nation.
THE ARTIFICIAL STATE
A different kind of machine politics.
THE HONEST ISLAND GREG JACKSON
Craint did not know when he had come to the island or why he had come.
THE SHIPWRECK DETECTIVE
Nigel Pickford has spent a lifetime searching for sunken treasure-without leaving dry land.
THE HOME FRONT
Some Americans are preparing for a second civil war.
SYRIA'S EMPIRE OF SPEED
Bashar al-Assad's regime is now a narco-state reliant on sales of amphetamines.
TUCKER EVERLASTING
Trump's favorite pundit takes his show on the road.