Tired of new writers? Hungering for more from some of the established greats? Then I’ve got good news for you: William Styron’s got a posthumous “collection of fiction”:http://www.observer.com/2008/media/posthumous-fiction-collection-william-styron-be-published-random-house coming out, which will include a chapter from an unfinished novel. Styron, who died in 2006, is best-known, of course, for “Sophie’s Choice”:http://tinyurl.com/6buy3f and “The Confessions of Nat Turner”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Confessions_of_Nat_Turner_%281967%29 (both controversial when they were published), as well as “Darkness Visible”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkness_Visible:_A_Memoir_of_Madness, his well-known memoir about his first struggle with major depression.
If you’re a fan, or interested in learning more, check out “his daughter’s memoir”:http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/10/071210fa_fact_styron from the December 10, 2007 issue of The New Yorker, Styron’s own New Yorker “essay “:http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1995/09/18/1995_09_18_062_TNY_CARDS_000372118about about being misdiagnosed with syphillis when he was 19, “audio interviews”:http://wiredforbooks.org/williamstyron/ with the author from 1981 and 1982, or this hour-long “video appreciation”:http://www.charlierose.com/shows/2006/11/03/2/an-appreciation-of-author-william-styron of the author and his work that appeared on Charlie Rose.

Back in April, I posted about The New Yorker’s (TNY) recent propensity for publishing British fiction that (sometimes) requires translation, at least for those of us who grew up talking ’merican instead of the Queen’s English.

Little did I know at the time that the pleasure of doping out the lingo of our cousins across the pond had been systematically stolen from oodles of American readers of Harry Potter. That’s right: the U.S. editions of the Potter books (pre-2000, anyhow) were, um, bowdlerized (albeit unevenly) with the cooperation of the author, as Daniel Radosh reported in the September 20, 1999 issue of TNY.

Unfortunately, the complete version of Radosh’s “Talk of the Town” piece isn’t available online, so I urge those of you with the Complete New Yorker to check it out in its entirety. For the rest of you, here’s a taste:

In the American edition, “wonky” becomes “crooked”; “bobbles” turn into “puff balls”; and “barking mad” translates to “complete lunatic.” “Git,” “ickle,” and “nutters,” however, are left as they are. Why does Father Christmas become Santa Claus, and “bogey” become “booger,” but “budge up” not become “move over”?

Ah, well. Hard enough on the editors as it was, making sure they switched all the single quotation marks for double quotation marks, and vice versa.

I’ve admired Muriel Spark ever since a friend recommended her 1981 novel, Loitering with Intent, which I know I found delightful, though I cannot, now, remember a word of it. But I found other work of hers less congenial, and neglected her until a few weeks ago, when Emily tipped me off to a fascinating 2006 piece by Philip Weiss in The New York Observer chronicling Spark’s relationship with The New Yorker.

The Observer post is actually the second of two, and they’re both worth reading. The first gives an opinionated, informative overview of Spark’s entire oeuvre and a few details of her life. From the second, we learn that Spark was in her most prolific period when she came to TNY‘s attention in the late 1950s, and soon published her most famous novel of all, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, in the October 14, 1961, issue. This was news to me, so I went back to my Complete New Yorker and found that, although it is not true, as Weiss claims, that the “entire issue” was devoted to Brodie, as with John Hersey’s Hiroshima in 1946, a significant portion of it was.
That TNY should devote so many pages to her work was a signal honor, and one she was accorded again when much of the May 16, 1970, issue was given over to her bizarre turnoff of a novel, The Driver’s Seat. (Wish I could’ve seen the hate mail for that!) Given this, I found it surprising that she wasn’t mentioned in Ben Yagoda’s About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made. According to Weiss, she doesn’t appear in other books about TNY either, which is stranger still.

The Observer post led me to the first story Spark published in TNY, “The Ormolu Clock,” from September 17, 1960. A spare portrait of the struggle between the proprietors of two tourist hotels in Austria, the story is a minor but compact gem. The more successful proprietor, Frau Lublonitsch, is complex. Take, for example, the first portrait we get of her:

You could tell … that Frau Lublonitsch had built the whole thing up from nothing by her own wits and industry. But she worked pitiably hard. She did all the cooking. She supervised the household, and, without moving hurriedly, she sped into the running of the establishment like the maniac drivers from Vienna who tore along the highroad in front of her place. She scoured the huge pans herself, wielding her podgy arm round and round; clearly, she trusted none of the girls to do the job properly. She was not above sweeping the floor, feeding the pigs, and serving in the butcher’s shop, where she would patiently hold one after another great sausage under her customer’s nose for him to smell its quality. She did not sit down, except to take her dinner in the kitchen, from her rising at dawn to her retiring at one in the morning.

Compare the Frau, then, with her bedroom, glimpsed briefly by the narrator:

It was imperially magnificent. It was done in red and gold. I saw a canopied bed, built high, splendidly covered with a scarlet quilt. The pillows were piled up at the head—about four of them, very white. The bed head was deep dark wood, touched with gilt. A golden fringe hung from the canopy …

The floor of the bedroom was covered with a carpet of red that was probably crimson but that, against the scarlet of the bed, looked purple. On the walls on either side of the bed hung Turkish carpets whose background was an opulently dull, more ancient red—almost black where the canopy cast its shade.

What in the world, one wonders, is the stolid, monochromatic Frau doing with such a bedroom? It’s an odd juxtaposition, and all the more intriguing for being unexplained.

Strange though the Frau might be, however, “The Ormolu Clock” is firmly realistic, and appears downright bland next to “The House of the Famous Poet,” which appeared in TNY on April 2, 1966.

“House” starts out with its feet planted on terra firma:

In the summer of 1944, when it was nothing for trains from the provinces to be five or six hours late, I traveled to London on the night train from Edinburgh, which, at York, was already three hours late. There were ten people in the compartment, only two of whom I remember well, and for good reason.

Nothing could be more mundane than this: we know the season and the year, and that it’s wartime in Britain. The narrator continues on to describe the two passengers she “remembers well,” a soldier of simian aspect and a young woman named Elise who works as “a domestic helper and nursemaid” in a London house. Elise invites the narrator to stay, and the narrator accepts because “at that time I was in the way of thinking that the discovery of an educated servant girl was valuable and something to be gone deeper into. It had the element of experience—perhaps even of truth, and I believed, in those days, that truth is stranger than fiction.” In other words, the narrator deigns to accept Elise’s invitation because she sees her as a curiosity.

The mundane details pile up (and I don’t mean to suggest, by using the word “mundane,” that they are boring). They arrive at the house, there are V-1 sirens in the background, there’s “a half-empty marmalade jar, a pile of papers, and a dried-up ink bottle.” There’s also “a steel-canopied bed known as a Morrison shelter”, and there’s mention of her food rations. The narrator makes much of Elise’s exhaustion; Elise holds an impromptu party, and the narrator heavily underscores how weary everyone is, while gently reminding the reader that there is a war going on: she talks again about the V-1 sirens, and about a young woman who has spent weeks sleeping in an air raid shelter in the Underground.

She is about to leave the next morning when the soldier she met on the train unaccountably shows up, with “an enormous parcel.” He proposes to sell it to her in exchange for his train fare back to camp. When she asks what it is, he says,

“It’s an abstract funeral,” he explained…

He took it out and I examined it carefully, greatly comforted. It was very much the sort of thing I had wanted—rather more purple in parts than I would have liked, for I was not in favor of this color of mourning. Still, I thought I could tone it down a bit.

She packs the abstract funeral into her “holdall” and into her pockets, and she runs out the door for her cab, “with the rest of my funeral trailing behind me.”

Whoa, Nelly! What’s become of the narrator’s belief that “truth is stranger than fiction”? Clearly, she no longer sees any necessary link between fiction and the world of fact. (Certainly, Spark did not. In a brief piece on the Brontës earlier that same year, Spark wrote, “… I believe that fiction should generally be considered a suspect witness (and if it is not stranger than truth, it ought to be) …”)

After the conventional naturalism of the first three-fifths of the story, Spark’s turn into the surreal is nothing short of vertiginous. The problem is, it violates the implicit contract between the author and reader about what sort of story this is; in the hands of a lesser writer, it would be intolerable. I’m not entirely sure it’s acceptable in Spark’s hands, either, but she knows what she’s done is extraordinary, and so her narrator pivots toward the reader to say,

You will complain that I am withholding evidence. Indeed, you may wonder if there is any evidence at all. “An abstract funeral,” you will say, “is neither here nor there. It is only a notion. You cannot pack a notion into your bag. You cannot see the color of a notion.”

You will insinuate that what I have just told you is pure fiction.

Insinuate it? I’d’ve told her that flat-out. From this point on, the story is no longer “pure fiction,” and we realize that it never was. It’s about an idea, a “notion” about notions—a meta-notion. On the train, the narrator meets the soldier again, learns that he makes these funerals “by hand,” and that both Elise and the famous poet have bought abstract funerals of their own. The soldier gets off the train, and after it leaves the station, mysteriously reappears.

“You again,” I said…

“No,” he said, “I got off at the last station. I’m only a notion of myself.”

This is unbearably cute, and it’s the point where I find Spark’s insistence on calling attention to the artifice of her story most irritating. The problem with metafiction and allegory is that they tend to punish the reader. Metafictionists want to frustrate the reader’s conventional, time-worn expectations of plot and character; allegorical writers deform the materials of the tale they are telling in order to make didactic points. Both forms can be intriguing and even perfect for their subject matter, but such instances are exceptions, not the rule.

Still, Spark manages to pull the story out of the hole. The soldier leaves the narrator at last (after some banter about the need for an abstract funeral because one can’t report on one’s own), she throws the abstract funeral out the window, and we are returned, mostly, to the conventional naturalistic story we began with: “In the summer of 1944, a great many people were harshly and suddenly killed…” In fact, we soon learn that both Elise and the famous poet were killed in an air raid just hours after the narrator left the poet’s house, and suddenly their funerals are no longer abstract.

But there are still some odd turns left. For one thing, Spark’s narrator, whenever she is “enraged by the thought that Elise and the poet were killed outright,” invokes not the people who died, but the mundane details of the house. Why? Because “the angels of the Resurrection will invoke the dead man and the dead woman, but who will care to restore the fallen house of the famous poet if not myself? Who else will tell its story?” Spark’s conversion to Catholicism explains the angels, perhaps, but it does nothing to explain the narrator’s focus on the house’s “blue cracked bathroom, the bed on the floor, the caked ink bottle, the neglected garden, and the neat rows of books.”

Why do those details matter so much? Because they keep the deaths of Elise and the poet from being entirely abstract, are proof that they lived? And why should their deaths matter, when the realistic premise of the entire story has been undermined, the narrator shown to be a puppet master as ruthless with her readers as she is with her characters?

Well, hold those questions a moment. Here’s the story’s last paragraph:

When I reflect how Elise and the poet were taken in—how they calmly allowed a well-meaning solder to sell them the notion of a funeral—I remind myself that one day I will accept, and so will you, an abstract funeral, and make no complaints.

The solider is, of course, the angel of death. He makes people’s funerals “by hand,” he comes and goes as he pleases (regardless of the laws of physics), and is only a “notion” until he becomes terrifyingly real, and the quotidian materials of everyday life—the cracked bathrooms, the dried-up inkwells—in which we invest so much of our emotional lives (as we see the narrator do when she visits the poet’s house) are all that we leave behind, poignant testimonies to our existence—so long as someone survives us who can bear witness. And with this finale, “The House of the Famous Poet” almost manages to have it both ways, to be both a meta-notion and a tragedy.

Or at least that’s how I see the story. I don’t pretend to fully understand it, and in this I’m not alone, for even Robert Henderson, the TNY editor who accepted the story for publication, described himself, according to the Observer, as “a little baffled as well as fascinated” by it. If you’re in the mood for a challenge, I recommend it. Me, I’m going to go re-read Loitering with Intent.

Not too long ago, I raved about the podcast of Lorrie Moore’s story “Dance in America,” which was featured in April on the New Yorker website. Guess that was well timed, because The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore has recently been published. If you’re late to the Lorrie Moore party (if that’s quite the right word for her hilarious but sad style), you should check out this excellent review.

Meanwhile, Louise Erdrich, who did a stellar job reading and discussing Moore’s story in the podcast, has also come out with a new novel, The Plague of Doves, which has gotten some intriguing reviews. You can read the first chapter at The New York Times or, of course, at TNY, where it first appeared as a story with the same title. I haven’t read either version yet, but I noticed the opening lines differ slightly.

In fact, it looks like all of Erdrich’s recent TNY stories made it into her new novel. Pluto, North Dakota, where Doves is set, was also the setting for her superb story “Demolition,” which I praised at length a couple of months ago, and one of the novel’s main characters is the subject of “The Reptile Garden,” one of the better stories TNY has published this year. That the latter should turn out to be part of The Plague of Doves didn’t surprise me, since it felt more like part of a novel than a short story, but “Demolition” worked so well on its own that I’m curious how Erdrich integrated it into something longer. Now I’ve just got to read the book….

For those of you who, like Ishmael, are suffering from a damp, drizzly November in your soul and require a strong moral principle to prevent you from deliberately stepping into the street and methodically knocking people’s hats off, I’ve got just the thing: this month’s fiction podcast from The New Yorker features a reading of Jean Stafford’s story “Children Are Bored on Sundays,” which appeared in the magazine in 1948.
I was surprised and pleased to see Stafford singled out. Although many of her stories have not dated well, she wrote some gems that have endured. I wouldn’t have chosen “Children,” but I can see why Als finds it emblematic of her work, as well as personally meaningful. Perhaps for the next podcast he’ll go with my own favorite, “In the Zoo.”
(By the way, I wonder why Als chose the story? I thought only fiction writers chose stories for the fiction podcast, but Als, a staff writer and theater critic for the magazine, isn’t a fiction writer, as far as I know. Maybe there’s a surprise in store for us.)

Rereading Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus (1980), I found it difficult to adjust to her elliptical, portentous narrative style. After a few pages, however, something clicked, and I realized I was reading a master work: indirect but smoothly and intelligently told, with compelling characters and gorgeous prose.
In brief scenes densely packed with revealing detail and irony, the novel covers the lives of two Australian sisters, Caroline (or “Caro”) and Grace, orphaned as girls in 1938, who embark upon their romantic lives when they arrive in London, all grown up, some years after the end of World War II.
Caro receives the lion’s share of the novel’s attention—Hazzard clearly prefers her self-possession and independence of mind. She is pursued throughout the book (and her life) by an astronomer named Ted Tice, who, like Hazzard, idolizes Caro. She doesn’t reciprocate his passion, and most of the book is about love affairs with two other men; yet Ted is nothing if not constant, and he meets her from time to time, still hoping.
I have to stop a moment, though, and observe that the problem with this sort of summary—the problem with the summary of any novel—is that it typically fails to convey the book’s unique attractions. Because Transit is primarily concerned with the romantic lives of its characters, you may have concluded that I’ve latched on to some early species of “chick lit.” Hardly. In fact, it’s a tragedy, though the ending is so oblique that readers sometimes miss it.
Fortunately, you don’t have to take my recommendation on faith: you can fire up the Complete New Yorker and see for yourself. Hazzard published four excerpts from Transit in The New Yorker: “A Long Story Short” (July 26, 1976), “A Crush on Doctor Dance” (September 26, 1977; hilariously categorized under “dance” in the CNY), “Something You’ll Remember Always” (September 17, 1979), and “She Will Make You Very Happy” (November 26, 1979).
As a set, these four stories work remarkably well. “Something You’ll Remember Always” does a marvelously economical job of showing Grace and Caro’s childhood; Grace is courted by Christian Thrale in “She Will Make You Very Happy”; years after they marry, Christian has an affair with a secretary in his office, which he ends with brutal coldness, as we learn in “A Long Story Short”; and then Grace herself, unaware of Christian’s affair, falls in love with the family pediatrician in “A Crush on Doctor Dance,” though the good doctor’s principles and her own timidity conspire to keep their relationship unconsummated and brief.
To give you a sense of Hazzard’s gifts, I offer this passage from “Something You’ll Remember Always.” It begins with a verse that refers to the reversal of the seasons between England in the northern hemisphere and Australia in the southern: spring starts in September. Hazzard goes on:

You might recite it in Elocution class, but could hardly have it in English Poetry. It was as if the poet had deliberately taken the losing, and the Australian side…. What was natural was hedgerows, hawthorn, skylarks, the chaffinch on the orchard bough. You had never seen these but believed in them with perfect faith. As you believed, also, in the damp, deciduous, and rightful seasons of English literature and in lawns of emerald velours, or in flowers that could only be grown in Australia when the drought broke and with top-dressing. Literature had not simply made these things true. It had placed Australia in perpetual, flagrant violation of reality.

In that single paragraph, Hazzard captures the attitudes of two societies, English and Australian. But this is a story that is at least partly about the transference of cultural hegemony from Britain to America. So things are changing. Before World War II, little girls in Australia might sing,

Come down to Kew in lilac-time
(it isn’t far from London!)

But then the war arrives, bringing with it American soldiers (who “could not provide history, of which they were almost as destitute as the Australians”) and plastic gimcracks:

It was the first encounter with calculated uselessness…. The natural accoutrements of their lives were now seen to have been essentials—serviceable, workaday—in contrast to these hard, high-colored, unblinking objects that announced, though brittle enough, the indestructibility of infinite repetition….

Never did they dream, fingering those toys and even being, in a rather grownup way, amused by them, that they were handling fateful signals of the future.

It was not long after this that the girls began to wave their unformed hips and to chant about Chattanooga and the San Fernando Valley. Sang, from the antipodes, about being down in Havana and down Mexico way. Down was no longer down to Kew. The power of Kew was passing like an empire.

Definitely not fluff.

Also introduced in “Something You’ll Remember Always,” is Dora, Caro and Grace’s half-sister. Twenty-two when the death of their parents thrusts the two younger girls into her care, she is gradually revealed to be narcissistic and emotionally draining. “Keeping up emotional appearances,” Hazzard writes, “they were learning to appease and watch out for her. Dora’s flaring responses to error might now be feared, or any kindling of her enchafed spirit.”
“Enchafed spirit”—what an amazing phrase. But there’s more:

She said she could do away with herself. Or she could disappear. Who would care, what would it matter. They flung themselves on her in terror, Dora don’t die, Dora don’t disappear. No, she was adamant: it was the only way.
How often, often, she drew upon this inexhaustible reserve of her own death, regenerated over and over by the horror she inspired by showing others the very brink. It was from their ashen fear that she rose, every time, a phoenix. Each such borrowing from death gave her a new lease on life.

And that’s Dora, perfectly drawn with a touch of irony. When Grace’s future husband, Christian, meets Dora in “She Will Make You Very Happy,” he observes to himself, “She was one of those persons who will squeeze into the same partition of a revolving door with you, on the pretext of causing less trouble.” Zing!
Christian, in turn, is given little quarter. A methodical young bureaucrat, he makes an uncharacteristically impetuous decision to attend a concert, where he meets Grace and makes a date to call on her. When he arrives, Caro is there as well.

He found these women uncommonly self-possessed for their situation. They seemed scarcely conscious of being Australians in a furnished flat. He would have liked them to be more impressed by his having come, and instead caught himself living up to what he thought might be their standards and hoping they would not guess the effort incurred. Quickness came back to him like a neglected talent summoned in an emergency: as if he rose in trepidation to a platform and cleared his throat to sing.

Christian’s snobbery is evident; the scene comes alive, however, because the sisters are sure of their dignity. So sure, in fact, that he can’t play the lordly Englishman, deigning to call on the colonials. It galls him a little that they’ve not made special preparations for his visit. “A room where there had been expectation would have conveyed the fact—by a tension of plumped cushions and placed magazines, a vacancy from unseemly objects bundled out of sight; by suspense slowly dwindling in the curtains.” But he is not in such a room.

Still, he can’t help who he is, and he manages only to tone down his condescension, rather than stifle it altogether. Momentarily, he realizes that “he was the one in need of rescue, that Grace might easily do better than take up with him…. But health was hard to maintain: self-importance flickered up like fever.”
And there you’ve got Christian.
These are fine, believable characters, caught and held in Hazzard’s exquisite prose. To enjoy them yourself, I strongly recommend you find her book. But these four stories make an excellent introduction.

The latest installment of our column about New Yorker fiction, past and present, by writer and editor Benjamin Chambers.
In her review of Ha Jin’s story “The House Behind a Weeping Cherry,” which appeared in the April 7 issue of The New Yorker (TNY), Sarah of the blog Sarah Writes says that the story, although written in English, “successfully captures the inflections of translation, and replicates translators’ reliance on stock expressions to replace untranslatable idioms.”
She finds this aspect of the story “distracting,” but that’s neither here nor there, as her comments immediately brought to mind a different language problem that’s been on mind lately as I read each week’s story in TNY: translations from the British.
Anyone who grew up on a hefty diet of P.G. Wodehouse and English detective fiction would have no trouble with Tessa Hadley’s “Friendly Fire,” for example, which appeared in the February 4 issue of TNY. When Hadley’s characters take “a fag break” while talking on their “mobiles,” put their “kit in the boot” of their cars, run around like “mad things,” or own homes on what used to be a “council estate,” you know what’s meant.
Less often, however, does one happen by the old family hearth in a story to find characters sitting by “the Aga,” or stove, as in John Burnside’s “The Bell Ringer,” which appeared in the March 17 issue, or discover a woman contemplating—along with flower arranging and foreign language classes—joining The Women’s Institute (a voluntary organization that helps educate and mobilize women on political issues) or Toc H. (Even Burnside’s protagonist wasn’t sure what Toc H was. Turns out it’s a Christian service club “committed to building a fairer society.” No mention of whether it approves of clootie dumpling.)
If you’re unhip, as I am, phrases in Hari Kunzru’s “Raj, Bohemian,” from the March 10 issue of TNY, might throw you completely. Kunzru’s narrator sneers at the “trendies—fashion kids who tried too hard, perennially hoping to get hosed down by the paps or interviewed about their hair.”
Hosed down by the—eh? Come again? I finally figured out this was just a cute way of saying they wanted their picture taken by paparazzi. That usage may not be peculiarly British, but no matter: half a page later, I found the genuine article. When the narrator is asked to an exclusive party, his friends and acquaintances want him to get them in the door, but he turns them down. Why? “It was a rule, an unofficial rule: no liggers and no hangers-on.”
”Liggers”? Huh? It took a little bit of digging, but I finally discovered that in Brit usage, a “ligger” is someone who crashes a party. Who knew?
And if you were wondering about those “two Traveller kids” racing buggies out near the airport in Roddy Doyle’s “The Dog,” in the November 5, 2007, issue, your curiosity might be somewhat allayed when you learn that the Travellers are a roving people, known in the vernacular as Gypsies.
All this British vocabulary might make some American readers feel a bit like outsiders. Not to worry—apparently, that feeling is a national characteristic. Check out this gem from Burnside’s “The Bell-Ringer,” so perfectly keyed to skewer American readers of TNY that I half-wondered if he inserted it after his story was accepted: “Harley was always polite with her, in the way that Americans are: doggedly courteous and, at the same time, utterly remote, like the landing party in an old episode of ‘Star Trek,’ curious and well-meaning and occasionally bewildered, but sworn not to interfere in the everyday life of their hosts.”
No need for a translation there, I shouldn’t think, wot?

The latest installment of a new column on New Yorker fiction, past and present, by writer and editor Benjamin Chambers.
It occurred to me that it would be fun to do occasional posts on fiction that appeared in The New Yorker 50 years ago. To start off, I simply did a quick scan of The Complete New Yorker (CNY) for fiction published in 1958, and son of a gun, I came up with a winner right away: Michael J. Arlen’s delightful “Are We Losing the Novel Race?” from April 19, 1958. (This particular Arlen, by the way, is not to be confused with his father, the popular Armenian writer mentioned in one of the earliest issues of TNY, who later made the cover of Time.)
“Novel Race” deftly and briefly satirizes domestic fears, post-Sputnik, that America was falling behind the Soviets—in this case, in the length of its novels. And even though I wouldn’t classify the piece as fiction, really, its winning, jaunty tone and well-deserved jab at Ayn Rand make it worth digging up.
In case you’re curious, here are a few other notable writers published in TNY in 1958: John Cheever, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Frank O’Connor, S.J. Perelman, Penelope Mortimer, William Maxwell, Robert Graves, Nadine Gordimer, V.S. Pritchett, Peter Taylor, and Elizabeth Taylor (no, not that one, the other one). Familiar names there, definitely.
Some folks I didn’t recognize (though perhaps they were well-known in literary households then): Dean Doner, Kim Yong Ik, Parke Cummings, and Florence Codman. I look forward to digging in and reporting back. In fact, I think I’ll do a similar scan of fiction from 25 years ago, too. Stay tuned.