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  1. The New YorkerBen Lerner5/20/1921 min
    15 reads3 comments
    9.5
    The New Yorker
    15 reads
    9.5
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    • Pegeen
      Top reader this weekReading streakScoutScribe
      2 years ago

      Absolute 10! Glad it was suggested to me because I missed this one when it was AOTD. Just awesome writing. Love short stories - the brevity makes for more deliberate, concise and impactful scene structures. Very creative.

    • DellwoodBarker3 years ago

      Really, really slowly I started lowering myself in my chair, like sliding down out of it, while he was eating his ravioli talking about whatever. My mom was already in the kitchen, loading the dishwasher; she never eats. It required a lot of core strength going down so slowly. All those crunches. All that crystal (joking). At dance they are always telling me to visualize a movement as I do it and I was visualizing myself as a liquid flowing down the chair. All the way down off my chair until I was literally under the table and my stepdad still hadn’t noticed anything, and my mom was in there cleaning, and I was trying not to laugh.

      Dinner Party Goals. Lol.

      Kinda like my pact with Lovers that If We Ever start arguing: It’s Time To Get Naked.

    • bill
      Top reader of all time
      3 years ago

      Perfect. Gripping.

      I have so many things to say about gender, voice, etc., but I think the moral of the story is to just shut your damn mouth every once in a while.

      “Ross Perot and China,” is a brilliant title.

      1. Update (12/21/2020):

        Okay, I had to go back in the archives to confirm my suspicion: This story has so much in common with “Are You Experienced?”

        Looking back at a comment I made on that one double-confirms it. Both stories involve love-struck teens getting into some shenanigans; men (both fathers and sons) who talk too much, at nothing; and a massive zoom-out near the end that puts everything in perspective. In “Ross Perot and China” it’s this line:

        It would take Adam twenty years to grasp the analogy between her slipping from the chair and from the boat.

        Whenever a writer does that, I can only think of Rolph from Jennifer Egan’s “Safari”/A Visit from the Goon Squad. Damn, I love reading.