We’ve just finished finalizing edits on our upcoming issue, which means that we’ve become very familiar with the stories, poems, and essays contained within. Like, super familiar. Like, sit-three-to-a-seat-on-a-school-bus-on-a-hot-day familiar.
After all that quality time spent with prose and poetry, staff favorites tend to emerge. Here’s Associate Editor Becky Adnot-Haynes on why she likes Aharon Levy’s “Philomela in Tribeca”:
Levy’s piece is one of those short stories that could have been bad if it wasn’t so good: thirty-somethings in New York, ennui, thwarted love—all gathered at a party involving fancy cupcakes and clever, self-conscious conversation.
But Levy pulls off his premise brilliantly, and the result is a story that’s not only successful in its idiosyncratic portrayals of the people who inhabit the main character’s world—the partygoer who speaks too seriously in unserious situations, the hostess who moves about her party like “a cheery hurricane”—but which also lays those characters bare, refusing to apologize for them, to handle them with kid gloves. The story’s protagonist, Dan Slotkin, is neither hero nor villain, and Levy is perfectly comfortable treading the space between.
There are so many small joys in the story—the way that Levy refuses to take himself too seriously, his lovely prose and knack for simile: “clothing scattered over the floor, unerotic as fruit peelings” and “[his] worry, amoeba-ish, oozed into new forms, lurked in various corners of the room like an untrusting, just-adopted cat” are two of Levy’s delightful phrases—but his talents run deeper than that, sweeping toward an ending that is as artful as it is inevitable. And along the way? A secret revealed by way of decorate-your-own cupcakes.
