The Sheila Variations

Big Arm Woman has been smacking them around for a while now. She slammed on their editorial content here, and their reporting style here.

Revenge for publishing Henry James. I told you there would be consequences.

I can't open those links for some reason.

Atlantic has always been one of my favorite magazines, for a variety of reasons. One being that through them I was introduced to Robert Kaplan (long before Balkan Ghosts) - and his writing has pretty much changed my life.

Odd, I can't either, but when I cut and paste into the browser, they work:

http://www.bigarmwoman.com/archives/000628.html

http://www.bigarmwoman.com/archives/000665.html

See if that works.

hmmm. i'll give those a shot. Thanks, John.

I read the articles, John. Regardless of the magazine's political leanings, it has been for a very long time one of THE magazines for short fiction in this country. They are few and far between, and closing down in droves. It saddens me deeply. I care about short fiction, and not that I think there's a huge market for it - I don't - but market value is not everything.

If you look at their history of fiction, and the canon of writers they have published (many for the first time! People who went on to be giants) - it makes me sad to see them stopping that part of the magazine.

And lastly, about the Atlantic - I have such a vivid memory of tripping over some random travel piece Robert Kaplan wrote for them - in the late 80s, I think. About Azerbaijan, if I recall correctly, and I was completely transported by it. A whole world opened up to me. I don't think I had ever even heard of Azerbaijan at that point. I thought: I need to read everything this guy has ever written! He still publishes pieces with them regularly - so even though I have to wait what feels like a tremendously long time between his books (haha - he publishes one a year now!!), I can always find other stuff of his on The Atlantic.

I just found BAW's take on the legacy of HS Thompson to be funny. I read the Atlantic from time to time, but never really got pulled into a subscription. I'm sad to see all the traditional outlets for fiction getting squished, but the Internet in general and the blog community in particular (through referrals)is providing an alternative outlet. Obviously, the filterless Internet is going to increase the noise without increasing much signal at first, but that's where the blog referrals come in.

One of my favorite collections of short stories on Vietnam, Humidity Moon, is pretty much completely available on the net. It was also published in book form, but I doubt I'd ever have come across it if it weren't for the Net.

Humidity Moon, huh? Who wrote it? Please point the way, John - always looking for good recommendations.

Have you read The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien? One of my favorite collections of all time - also all Vietnam stories.

Mike Rodrigez. The URL is here:

http://lonestar.texas.net/~mikerod/Stories/stoc.html

It's from a Hispanic perspective, which gives it a nice spin. My favorite one is this:

http://lonestar.texas.net/~mikerod/Stories/letter.html

Thanks.

John: Thanks for the 'Humidity Moon' links...seems interesting...also, the bigarmwoman links are giving 404 due to the trailing slash.