recommended reading: The Atlantic fiction issue

This past week I read The Atlantic magazine's "Fiction Issue 2005". Apparently this is an issue they publish annually, filled with short stories, poetry, and essays on literary subjects. It will be on sale in bookstores and newsstands now through October, and it might be worth getting if you find a copy; I read it cover to cover, and every story was fantastic.

The authors were mostly people I had not read before, with the exception of Joyce Carol Oates and Nathan Englander. Oates' story, "*BD* 11 1 86", is about a high school senior raised in foster homes who wonders why adults seem to be treating him differently - avoiding eye contact, not wanting to talk about his future plans - and only discovers on his graduation day that he has been raised as a "body donor". The development of the character and his gradual realization of his fate make the horrific premise all the more chilling.

Englander's story, "How we avenged the Blums", is one of several in the magazine that concern the persecution of Jews. In this case, it is a group of kids in Long Island being bullied by a kid they call The Anti-Semite - they resolve themselves to fight back, with comic and tragic results. The other Jewish stories are much darker - "The House on Kronenstrasse" by Shira Nayman, in which a woman discovers how Nazi persecution transformed her family's fate and her own identity, and Maximilian Schlaks' "Tell them, please tell them", a Russian soldier's account of a Jewish friend tortured by fellow soldiers.

The other stories in the issue are equally fascinating, exploring themes of family, relationships, sexuality, spirituality, etc. The level of writing is so consistently high, it is impossible to choose a highlight. I want to quote a bit of an essay by Saul Bellow though, his credo on morality in art, which especially struck me:

To look for elaborate commitments [of morality] is therefore vain. Commitments are far more rudimentary than any "position" or intellectual attitude might imply. I should like to suggest that commitment in a novel may be measured by its power to absorb us, by the energy it contains. A book which is lacking in power cannot be moral. Dullness is worse than obscenity. A dull book is wicked. It may intend to be as good as gold, as nice as pie, as sweet as can be, but if it is banal and boring, it is evil...

An art which is to be strong cannot be based on opinions. Opinions can be accepted, questioned, dismissed. A work of art can't be questioned or dismissed.
-The Atlantic Monthly fiction issue 2005, p. 95