Reading The Beach Boy in this week's New Yorker

PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVID BRANDON GEETING FOR THE NEW YORKER
DESIGN BY TAMARA SHOPSIN

And today's short story brings me right up to date although there is a sense, perhaps, it exists as a remnant of a bygone or fading age; the era of the literary journal, the printed magazine, a periodical.  In this instance The New Yorker.

In his General Introduction to The Penguin Book of the British Short Story Philip Hensher writes of the part played by magazines and journals in promoting and sustaining short story writing before lamenting the decline of such periodical platforms.  There has ensued, he argues, both a loss of engagement with the form and a change of focus (from magazine to competition as the dominant but distorting platform) for those who write short stories.  Mr. Hensher writes,

"For the greater part of the short story's history in Britain, the main publishers of short fiction were the editors of magazines and journals ... Blackwood's, Chamber's Edinburgh Journal, Household Words, All the Year Round, Cassell's, The Fortnightly Review, The Strand, ..."

then continues,

"The possibilities for the writer of short stories have narrowed significantly in recent years. Where once there was any number of paying journals ... now the principal outlet for many writers of short stories is not publication but competitions."

before concluding this thread of his Introduction with the mildly depressing observation that,

"There are very few outlets still able to pay a writer for a short story in a way that could encourage a writer to persist, and with the sort of editorial investment that will enable a writer to develop. Most of them are in the United States. The New Yorker has, happily, been able to develop the short-story writing careers of two of the best short-story writers now at work, Tessa Hadley and Zadie Smith.  There is no British journal that would have published Hadley's stories, as the New Yorker has, twenty-one times, and paid properly for them."

These are reasonable observations, accurately describing a decline in printed publication that's clear and regrettable, I'm sure.  Oddly, however, it seem to me almost nothing is said by Mr. Hensher about the role now played by online platforms.  There is, I think, a sense in which his Introduction limits itself to a lament for the lost era of publishing newspapers, magazines, journals, etc in hard copy forms.  And that's fair enough - up to a point.  For those of us of a certain age that's how it has been for most of our lives and for centuries before us.  But ten years from now not even The New Yorker will survive in hard copy, printed format.  We'll still be reading short stories though, online in new-form periodicals and journals.  Who knows, there may even be a renaissance of the short story?

None of which is what I originally came here to write about today.  

Otessa Moshfegh. Photo by Krystal Griffiths

I came to note the engaging, intriguing short story I read in The New Yorker as it happens (which explains my ruminations above).  It's a story called The Beach Boy by Otessa Moshfegh (of whom I had never heard until I visited this week's New Yorker site - which only tells you something about my lack of knowledge).  There's a detached alienation to the narrative voice in the story; a sense of fin de siècle anomie (if that's not too daft a notion given the date).  In a Q&A article linked to the publication of the story Ms. Moshfegh talks of her interest in "repressed Western consciousness" around which her story circulates in a seductive way.  Like most of the contents of The New Yorker the story is well worth reading, and not simply as a contemporary contrast to something like Defoe's work (yesterday) from 300 years ago but as a good read in its own right.