The New Yorker Archives

New Yorker: The Empties by Jess Row – Genre Metafiction

Post published:October 30, 2014
Post category:On Writing Short Story Reviews
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Published in the October 27, 2014 issue of The New Yorker, "The Empties" by Jess Row is a postapocalyptic (or is it distopian?) short story set in the Northeast. What grabbed me about this story was in the fourth paragraph, where Row's characters step back and view their own narrative. What story are we in? What's happening?

“MFA vs NYC”: Both, Probably

Post published:May 1, 2014
Post category:Craft
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The archetypal anti-workshop argument was made by David Foster Wallace in “The Fictional Future,” a section of a 1988 essay that is reprinted in “MFA vs NYC.” In his telling, creative-writing programs are filled with teachers who would rather be writing than teaching, and who resent their students for the lost time.