Bloodless Coup

Haruki Murakami and William Trevor in The New Yorker

Out of the many (many, many, many, many ....) things I read on a regular basis, The New Yorker is always my top priority. Of course I adore New York, so I like to keep up on the major happenings in the city. But beyond that, to me no other periodical regularly provides such interesting, insightful and well written pieces on politics and the arts. With people like Anthony Lane, Paul Goldberger, George Packer, Seymour Hersh and Sasha Frere-Jones regularly filling its pages, it's something that I often wish I could read from cover to cover. However, even though I often love it so, time constraints are time constraints, and frequently I have to skip a few things. And sadly, especially since I'm a big fan of short fiction, their short fiction stories are among the things I too frequently have to skip. Still, I try to make time for it on occasion, and if like me you enjoy short fiction but don't know if you have the time to read a new story every week ... well, let me point you to two you should definitely check out in case you still have copies of the magazine lying about your house. "Where I'm Likely to Find It" by Murakami in the May 2 issue and "The Room" by William Trevor in the May 16 issue are both little gems. These are two of the best stories I've read in The New Yorker in months, and they are quite different works, so ... well, I encourage you to check 'em out. And of course if you have giant piles of The New Yorker lying about, you might want to go back and read Joyce Carol Oates' "Spider Boy" from September 20, 2004. That story is still with me.