I canceled my subscription to The New Yorker

I decided not to renew it about a month ago, and of course they immediately started running way more interesting stuff. Not that I didn't usually enjoy it, but I never actually read an entire issue from cover to cover. The stories were occasionally very good, but too often unremarkable. From now on I plan to read it for free in the school library. It's mind-boggling that they used to publish Barthelme so regularly. Anyone know where I can find a list of all the people that currently have first-read agreements with The New Yorker?

Eyeshot is Back

Eyeshot has reopened to submissions:

http://eyeshot.net/submit.html

Nobel Prize Winner Herta Müller (?)

I just took the 2009 Literature Prize sidebar survey at Nobelprize.org, which asks "Have you read anything by Herta Müller?" The results were 7% YES and 93% NO (I answered NO). I never read anything by last year's winner, J. M. G. Le Clézio, until he won, at which point I read a short story; it was not bad. The Nobel Prize in Literature is usually given to an obscure European, which is fine, but makes it a bit of a charity-lottery for those who write reasonably well about oppression. Nobel laureates receive 10,000,000 Swedish kronor, currently $1,429,247. People passed over for the prize include:

Borges
Chekhov
Joyce
Nabokov
Proust
Tolstoy
Zola

Sarte won the award but refused to accept it. Whatever you think of his prose, he had convictions.

George Saunders's New Yorker Victory Lap

I just read "Victory Lap," a new short story by George Saunders. I was impressed by it, much more so than by "Al Roosten," which appeared in the New Yorker last February. "Al Roosten" was funny, of course, and well written, but it seemed too much like a reworking of his story "Winky" in the collection Pastoralia. Poking fun at a pathetic, sad, rambling person assailed by pop culture. "Victory Lap" is intense, and I won't spoil the ending, but merely say that its form is experimental, though the story has a driving good/evil life-or-death struggle at its heart. Saunders inserts French and Latin phrases, has he done this before? He also uses {these brackets}. I would say they are {effective}. How very "Wallacian" of him. This latest story probably has his most believable evil character, though as you would expect, he (the character) is not unfunny. Saunders too, cannot be unfunny: "Mom and Dad would be heartsick if they could hear the swearing he sometimes did in his head, such as crap-cunt shit-turd dick-in-the-ear butt-creamery."