Now We Are Five

7.  Now We Are Five, by David Sedaris.  Published in The New Yorker magazine's October 21, 2013 issue.  There is no one alive who can tell a story or write like David Sedaris.

I also recommend listening to David Sedaris read his personal essay Now We Are Five offered on This American Life with Ira Glass. It is flawless storytelling.

Episode 517:  Day at the Beach Act 4, January 31, 2014 

Repeated episode 714:  Day at the Beach, Act 4, August 12, 2020

Now We Are Five is also included in his book Calypso.

On a lighter note and not exactly related, but sort of related, the following is a delightful and very well-written essay titled The Joy of Picking Up Other People's Trash by Jazmine Hughes, published by the New York Times Magazine on 11/01/2023.  In paragraph 6, the author references David Sedaris's propensity for doing the same with a link to a You Tube video of Seth Meyers interviewing David Sedaris.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Tiger Hunt in India

Image
2 .   Man-eaters by Brian Phillips.   Published in The Ringer, September 25, 2018 In an exclusive excerpt from his collection ‘Impossible Owls,’ the writer Brian Phillips goes on a quest for tigers in India. Man-Eaters was awarded a Sidney Award by New York Times columnist, David Brooks, in 2018.  At the end of each year, David Brooks publishes the Sidney Awards in his NYT op-ed column recognizing his favorite long-form essays of the year. In his 2018 The Sidney Awards Part II column, David Brooks wrote:  "I mentioned in my last column that there were several excellent essays this year on tigers. My favorite is “Man-eaters” in The Ringer, in which Brian Phillips explains: “The arrival of a tiger, it’s true, is often preceded by moments of rising tension, because a tiger’s presence changes the jungle around it, and those changes are easier to detect. Bird calls darken. Small deer call softly to each other. Herds do not run but drift into shapes that suggest some emer...
Read more

A Writer's Tribute to Her Father

Image
13.  Personal History.: My Father's Stack of Books , by Kathryn Schulz.  Published in The New Yorker, March 18, 2019.  Illustration by Rose Wong " My father had a ravenous love of books, and his always had a devoured look to them ."  The illustration alone invites you to read this beautiful essay.  Kathryn Schulz is one of my favorite New Yorker writers and this essay reveals why.  I sent the link to this piece to two friends, both fathers and both readers and book lovers, on Father's Day 2019. I love this personal essay for many reasons.  But, for me, the crème de la crème is a paragraph toward the end that reads like a thing of beauty.  Schulz writes: In a kinder world—one where my father’s childhood had been less desperate, his fear of financial instability less acute, his sense of the options available to him less constrained—I suspect that he would have grown up to be a professor, like my sister, or a writer, like me. As it was, he derived e...
Read more

Interview: Hilary Mantel

 8 .  Hillary Mantel:  The Art of Fiction No: 226 , published in The Paris Review, Issue 212, Spring 2015.  Interviewed by Mona Simpson. “ I only became a novelist because I thought I had missed my chance to become a historian .” This is an interview with the two-time Booker Prize winner for the first two books in her Thomas Cromwell trilogy Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies .  The final book of the trilogy is The Mirror & the Light .  She wrote A Place of Greater Safety , a historical novel about the French Revolution, completing it when she was 27 years old!  Add her many contemporary fiction books, her memoir Giving Up the Ghost and innumerable essays; she was a prolific writer. Reading the interview, I also learned that Hilary Mantel thought Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson was the perfect novel.  HM's words:  "Kidnapped I read probably every couple of years at least. It never loses its magic for me."  A bit further on she...
Read more