Elizabeth Weiss – Eugene Fischer

Nonfiction:

“Bowling for Love” – Deborah Kennedy, on the perils of online dating.
“Kosher for Gentiles” – Elizabeth Weiss writes in The New Yorker about the latest purchase of Manischewitz and the branding power of “kosher.”
“Free Will in a Closed Universe” – Karen Burnham reviews Greg Egan’s ultra-hard-SF Orthogonal trilogy for the New York Review of Science Fiction.
“The Garbage Comes from the Garbage” – That was Evan James’s original title for this brilliant piece about a Grindr-mediated date.
“So Many Ways to Die in Syria Right Now” – Neil Gaiman writes about the things he saw when he visited a camp for Syrian refugees in Jordan.
“Meghan McCarron on Karen Joy Fowler” – Meghan wrote a lovely piece about Karen and her work for the Literary Mothers project.

Fiction:

“How to Get Back to the Forest” by Sofia Samatar – A visceral SF short story about the industrialization of education and those people who sometimes flash through your life with a bravery you’ll never match.
“History” by Thomas Gebremedhin – Thomas was one of a very few of my Iowa contemporaries with whom I never managed to share a workshop. So it was a delight to finally encounter his fiction in this lonely, lyrical little story.
“Stethoscope” by Ben Mauk – Ben I had workshop with many times, and this is one of the most memorable stories I’ve read in draft form. Seriously, it has stuck in my head for three years now. This is a long, free excerpt, with the full text available to subscribers to The Sun.

My friends are talented and prolific! Look at their things!

NONFICTION:

“Luxury Shopping, From The Other Side of the Register” – In December Carmen Machado wrote for the New Yorker about what it’s like to be working retail during the busiest shopping days of the year.
“Bummed Out and Ugly” – Alice Sola Kim with a beautiful and personal remembrance of Philip K. Dick.
“Crossroads and Coins: A Review of Naomi Mitchison’s Travel Light” – Amal El-Mohtar writing for NPR, another quite personal piece. Having recently read the book myself, I can confirm that it is as delightful as Amal claims.
“Scattered Leaves” – Ben Mauk writing for the New Yorker about the current practice of dismembering ancient manuscripts and selling individual pieces of them on eBay, as well as the long history of “book breaking.”
“To Flip a Flop” – Also in the New Yorker, Elizabeth Weiss writes about the economics of the broadway show, using the example of the largely unsuccessful Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark.

FICTION:

“The Glitch” – Rebekah Frumkin shows off her talent for claustrophobic interiority and familiarity with 64-bit Zelda games in this story at Granta.
“The Engineers” (pdf link) – Rebecca Rukeyser with a story in the Massachusetts Review of expatriate courtship in South Korea.

Tag: Elizabeth Weiss